Genetically enhanced children
An interview with Gregory Stock, Author of "Redesigning humans".
August 2002

In sci-fi movies like Starwars we watch visions of a future where everything has changed. Humans live in space colonies, robots are intelligent and cars fly. But in one respect time seems to have stood still: Human look exactly like they do now. With a quick change of costumes the movie actors would fit right into a drama from the 17th century instead. There is absolutely no sign that what it means to be "human" might have changed.
In fact, however, by the time we reach the future of Starwars, human bodies and abilities are likely to have gotten as different from the present, as the vehicles of the Starwars warriors are from the cars we drive today.
In the coming decades humans will start designing themselves in earnest. As our genes are mapped and the methods to select and manipulate them are refined, we will acquire the tools to perform deep changes in our appearance and character.
It's inevitable - and that's a good thing. It's a progress that we ought to support, rather than attempt to brake by making laws and regulations to keep it out ouf sight.
In short that is the argument that the american Gregory Stock raises in his book "Redesigning human - choosing our children's genes". Gregory Stock heads the program on medicine, technology and society at the School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Gregory Stock does not believe that genetic technology will give rise to a genetic upperclass:
"Often the technology is portrayed as taking a class and enhancing them to superhuman status, seperating them from the population at large. I don't believe that is in the cards in the immediate future because it is technologically so much easier to enhance diminshed performance, so in any performance category, be that health, mental functioning, physical activity or longevity, we will rather narrow the differences in the population by essentially moving those in the bottom half up to higher level", says Stock.
He belives that the characteristics that will be subject to choise, will concern personality rather than performance. Choices like: Are you more interested in sports, in being a musician or in being an outgoing personality:
"The axis is not between enhanced performance and diminished performance, but between the choices that make us different individuals. You can go out in the world today and you see people that are very different from ourselves in their orientation and in a variety of attributes. It seems to me that society could become more partitioned on those lines, because there will be self re-enforcing feedbacks that will develop, where people value their talents and qualities and can transfer and emphasize them in their children", says Gregory Stock.
If they had the choice, most parents would probably pick the very features that are always pushed in advertisements. In his book, Gregory Stock, quotes the online catalogue of a sperm bank: He has wavy dark brown hair and eyes. He´s 5'10" tall and weighs 156 lbs. on a medium frame… His ancestry is Eastern European… He is currently studying law with a GPA of 3.4. Other interests include music… ice-skating, and juggling."
In Stock's opinion this type of advertising can be seen as first taste of a new form of shopping. He concludes that the biological world is already shaped by fashion and market forces. The types of flowers and pets we choose to breed change those species. Now, human will themselves be subject to the same forces of technological development that shape commodities such as stereos and food processors.

More alike, more different
Selecting the genes of children does not necessarily imply any direct manipulation or adding any foreign genes. The technique called "pre-implantation diagnosis" is enough to get quite far in terms of controlling what kind of genes a child may have.
Pre-implantation diagnosis is already being used to test for certain grave inheritable diseases such as cystic fibrosis. It is used in conjunction with IVF (testtube fertilization). A couple that wants a child but who have family histories of cystic fibrosis can choose to use IVF - even if they could have become pregnant using the old fashioned method.
Typically, about 8 eggs are fertilized at once. This makes it possible to wait untill the eggs have started dividing, and then extracting a single cell which is analyzed to see if the DNA carries the defect that results in the dreaded disease. By choosing and inserting an egg that is free of the defect in the uterus of the women, the couple can be certain that their child will not have cystic fibrosis.
Presently, about 50 diseases can be tested for in this fashion. As the function of genes are being mapped, pre-implantation diagnosis will give doctors an increasingly detailed picture of the characteristics of the pre-embryo. Parents that opt for IVF treatment will in principle be able to choose from a string of potential embryos, picking the one whose traits best match what they wish in their child.
The next step would be actual interventions in the genes of the pre-embryo. The purpose would be to add completely new features that none of the genes of the parents contain. But it's risky and it's a longterm commitment: If the change is done immediately after conception, the new features will be passe on to all the coming generations.
In plants and animals it is a common procedure to transfer genes that are completely alien to a species. For instance, a gene that makes cells flourescent has been inserted into the DNA of many plants and animals although the gene is originally found in a flourescent jellyfish. On humans doctors will - initially, at least - only transfer genetic combinations that are found and proven to work in other persons, for instance a particular sequence of genes that's known to promote better memory.
Human genes are distributed on 23 chromosome pairs, which are situated in the cell nucleus. Seen under the microscopes the chromosomes resemble balls of yarn. Each chromosome consists of one long string of DNA, and the genes are distributed along that long string, like songs recorded on a tape.
To keep track of where new genes are inserted, Gregory Stock imagines using an extra, artificial chromosome which would work as a "cassette" containing the genes that the parents have choosen to enhance the abilites of their coming child.
The articificial chromosome could also be mounted with genes, that may turn out to be usefull later in life. If the person at some points develops cancer, there might be genes that can be activated in order to fight the disease.
By having all changes collected on an extra chromosom it would be much easier to undo the genetic intervention in case the child later decides not to pass the added genes on to his or her offspring. The chromosome could simply be removed during IVF - or it could be replaced with a new, improved model.

Mandatory IVF
One consequence of inserting an artificial chromosome would be that it commits the child to also having children via IVF when it grows up. If a man and a woman that want to have a children together have had various different changes done to their genes, it will be exceedingly hard to predict the outcome, when their genes are mixed. Perhaps they can't even have a child.
To Gregory Stock that development doesn't seem much more radical than some of the changes we have already seen within human reproduction. Lots of women have ceasarians today, and men whose sperm is so weak that it can't even swim and find the egg in the womans uterus can nevertheless have children today:
In fact, says Gregory Stock: "I suspect that at some point in the future infertility is going to become the norm. Today people take contraceptives in order to avoid having children. It would make sense if you had reletively long lasting contraceptive interventions that essentially create as the default state that you don't have children, you actively have to take somehing in order to have a child.
One could imagine it would be possible to release something into the environment - like a virus - that would cause infertility. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody did something like that, just because they don't want there to be overpopulation".
In Stock's opinion one could consider IVF to be the most natural form of human reproduction:
"What distinguishes humans from other primates is our use of tools and the fusion of technology into our lives. For us the most natural environment - the one we're familiar with and where most of us live - are cities. the use of technology is what we humans do, so the use of birth control is a pretty natural thing for us. In that sense IVF would be the ultimative example of this infusion of technology into the critical aspects of our lives"

In-evitable change
"The basic issue is that people look at the longterm future, and they see that these technologies, like biotech, genomics, and the computer evolution are transformative. If we continue to move forward, it becomes very difficult to imagine what the impacts are going to be. You can quibble about whether it's a hundred years or five hundred years, but they certainly have the potential to reshape our lifes in very profound ways and actually reshape us biologicaly as well.
People see that as our own demise, as the loss of all the things we value so clearly at this point, and they try and project that back into present policies to try to hold off these possibliites. But I don't think that can be done, because the technologies are so integral to everything else that we are doing and that we want very badly - from medical advances to better communication and games - and as a spinoff it will have these transformative effects", says Stock.
But to him, that would not necessarily imply that things turn to the worse:
"If all of the time we are making the choice of doing things that we look at as beneficial to us, then why must we assume that when sum up all of those choices that they end up being something that is destructive?", he asks.
"I find it in-defensable that we so casually are willing to forego these possibilities. As I see it there are two kind of riscs. One is that we are going to make some errors because moving forward is kind of a messy process. People are going to get hurt, there are going to be abuses, just as there always has been in the past with every other technology.
The other risc is that we are going to slow things down and delay the kinds of advances that are going to come out of medical research out of some sort of abstract fears about the future.
But I can virtually guarantee you that a coouple of hundred years from now society is going to be so different that it is not going to be recognizable to you, and that is going to occur whether or not you try to block genetic engineering.
So our choice is whether we are going to go forward in an eyes wide open fashion, and try to deal with problems as they arise - or whether we are going to put our heads in the sand and see if we can hold off the future.
In my view Europe has a tendency to go in that direction, and it's just going to make itself irrelevant to the future if it does that. We'll turn all of these things over to other people in other countries - like China, they are going to move forward very resolutely".


Gregory Stock is head of the program on medicine, technology and society at the School of Medicine of the University of California, Los Angeles. I 1989 Stock arranged the first major conference on the manipulation of the human germline, and since he has been a frequent commentator and advocate in the american media of exploiting the potential of biotechnology to repair defects - and in time even enhancing human abilities. As Stock sees it, significantly longer lifespans or genetically improved intelligence would be real improvements, and trying to delay them would be stupid.