Designer Babies

The trend to own everything designed by a designer continues, permeating through every aspect of our lives. Designer clothes, boots, sun glasses, bags, shoes……..the list is endless. You name it, you got it. The new one being designer babies. Huh! Now what the hell is that?

Designer babies is just a fancy name given to fancily promote genetic engineering. To be specific genetic mutation. It all started with Dolly the sheep, who was cloned from an egg. That led on to Rainbow the cute kitten pictured in a beaker. Followed by Lucy the mouse. Every since then people have been animatedly expressing their opinions regarding genetic engineering, hailing it and cursing it. It’s supposed to be a “cure” for eliminating herditary traits, and enhancing the better ones. We’re probably more closer to creating “designer babies” than we would like to admit.

Apparently, a survey published in the U.S. medical journal, “Fertility and Sterility” have shown that about 3% of the fertility clinics in the U.S. have been potentially processing awkward and horrifying requests by parents to genetically manipulate the DNA so that their child would have the same disability as the parents for eg. dwarfism or deafness. Truly malignant is’nt it? I shudder to think the other various ways humanity could misuse this technology, for the more you set out to probe into matters that are best left alone, the more nosy and greedy you get. Although not yet allowed on humans, it will not be long before some bright mind will devise a way, legally or illegally to create a clone of say Hitler………from probably a fragment of his nail, hair, anything that contains his DNA.

So basically rich couples who don’t know what to do with their money can just walk into a fertility clinic and literally order what they want in their baby and what they don’t. Kind of like hiring an interior decorator to do your house. Or picking from the menu at a restaurant. It becomes a status issue, to have the most perfect baby, both physically and mentally. So that they can brag about it in their political circles, and feel proud of themselves for having created a “superior” human being. The perfect height, skin colour, intelligence, eye colour, vision, sex and to some extent probably personality.

It ranges from manipulating the sex of the child, to selecting a particular embryo which will be allowed to develop, especially when the couples are at a high risk for certain genetically transmitted diseases, allowing them to screen out those embyos which happen to carry the gene. The scientific term for all of the above is Integreted Gene Management (IGM).

Soon the natural method of reproduction would be replaced by an artificiality both in manner and procedure. This is probably just another insight into the fact that money can buy you just about anything. Yes, the possibilities of IGM are endless, especially for those couples who suffer from cardiovascular problems, diabetes etc. all of which are heriditary. It will also offer a new lease of life to couples who have discovered at the embryo stage itself that it probably has genes for Down’s Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy and can save themselves a lot of suffering and heartache by discarding it in favour of another embryo. But what worries me is, that everything has a price. And it should’nt end up being too high to pay.