Q&A: Designer baby patent 'raises huge ethical issues'

Ethicist Dr Leslie Cannold says an American patent for a method that could allow people to choose genetic traits like eye colour or height in children opens up a wide series of ethical questions which, as a society, we must answer now.

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The patent for what is called a "gamete (egg or sperm) donor selection" method was granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to the firm 23andMe on September 24.

The new method developed by 23andMe would be based on a computerised comparison of the genomic data of the egg provider with that of the sperm provider. Characteristics on the parents' "shopping list" could include height, eye colour, muscle development, personality traits, or risk of developing certain types of cancer and other diseases.

Dr Leslie Cannold, academic ethicist, author, columnist and activist analyses the ethical ramifications of the development.

This is not really the first time that parents have been given the choice to choose non-disease related characteristics for their babe, is it?


No, it’s not. It's not the first time we can, but the first time we are starting to see a commercialisation, and an openness about the knowledge that has been increasingly available and, depending on the country, offered to parents as part of a service that often will accompany the use of IVF technology.

This issue has been a bit of a creeping problem because even though the technology was intended and designed to assist couples who were infertile to conceive, and couples who had genetic conditions in their families that they didn’t want to pass on, the knowledge that you gained trying to do that, could also inform you about other non-disease related characteristics, which could include gender in some situations, could include things like eye colour, and depending on how much you trusted the knowledge around very complex human characteristics, could inform us a bit about these characteristics, like athletic ability, like intelligence, like resilience.

So the new method brought in by 23andMe could bring about big changes?


23andMe has been building up a bio-bank of information, based on people submitting their personal DNA to 23andMe in order to find out something about their own genetic make-up, and as our scientific knowledge expands, there have been increasing claims of knowledge for a range of predispositions to disease. Things like, are you likely to end up with heart disease, are you likely to get diabetes? So increasingly, because we have always been interested in understanding what the relative contributions between nature and nurture have to do with various health conditions, we have started to hypothesise about that, and databases, like the one developed by 23andMe,  has enabled greater understanding to be gained about what are some of the genetic components that can lead people to manifest particular diseases. Now what 23andMe is offering is a computer analysis of your gametes, mixed with a range of prospective donor or your partner’s gametes, and the array of embryos those combinations could produce. Then they make some claims about what genetic characteristics or predispositions a child born from that embryo will have.

So what do you think are the main ethical questions that this raises?

The ethical question has always been the same. There’s practical questions around how accurate this sort of information really is, so when you talk about complex things like intelligence and you know that there is going to be an intersection between nature and nurture, you can raise very legitimate questions about how accurately or not the science can be when it tells you that this embryo will produce a child that has a 73% chance of having a higher IQ, which is often what they mean by intelligence, and that this embryo will turn into a child that only has a 23% chance. So, you can raise practical questions about how good or bad the science is, and I think those questions do need to be raised, because people are going to be spending money on this stuff, and they’re going to be potentially undertaking a very invasive process to conceive a child this way, where they otherwise might not. But the moral questions are: Should we do this? Is this something that is a freedom that individuals ought to have? And if individuals do have that freedom, what are the consequences for other individuals and for society as a whole?

Do you think being able to choose whether a child will have blue or brown eyes, whether it will be tall or not, more athletic or less, is actually close to the views held by eugenists in the past, who inspired the Nazis in a way?

Well, the difference between the eugenists and individual parents making the decisions is that the eugenists’ intentions were coming from a state, so the state was saying 'these are the sorts of children, these are the sorts of people we want to exist and to live, and we’re going to tell everybody that that’s how it's going to be, and we’re going to come in from the top and say these people don’t meet the criteria so we’re going to take them out, and we’re going to stop particular people from reproducing. We’re going to sterilise them', or things like that. The present situation appears to be less insidious, as it is individuals or individual couples making decisions about what they’re going to do. But the complexity is that the collective consequences of individual choices don’t lie just within those individual couples. They expand out and affect others. Therefore, the consequences will still be a reshaping of the sorts of people that are born, and the processes that others have to go through in order to give birth to children who they’re fulfilling obligations to with regard to being a parent who offers the child what we think parents should offer their children. But it is different for that reason.

And you’re saying it would still impact society as a whole?

It can’t help but impact society as a whole because what we do is lump things together like blue eyes, athletic ability and height. But in fact those things are different. So it’s not going to affect, in any meaningful way, the world in which I live in if some other couple decides to utilise the technology for what I would consider a quite a frivolous purpose of having a child who has blue eyes rather than brown. I don’t think that’s a good use of the technology, I don’t approve of it, but we live in a liberal democratic society in which people are allowed to do all sorts of things I don’t approve of. But if you talk about things like height, then height is a relative advantage, and in fact it does actually confer quite a lot of advantages to people. People who are taller have more chances of getting jobs, of getting married, but I’m only tall if you’re short. So what ends up happening is if people start to try and enhance their children for height, it either creates a justice problem where people who have the money and the knowledge and capacity to do that end up with children who, not only have the environmental advantage that comes from all those things, but also now have a genetic advantage because they’re taller, or it sparks off a higher height rate, in which everybody feels compelled to undertake IVF and produce children who are as tall as possible, which means that all we’ll end up doing is having the same kind of bell curve, but it’ll just be higher. So instead of having a range of people who are in a height of between four feet and eight feet, we’ll have a range of people who are in a height-span of between six feet and twelve feet. So no absolute gain will be achieved, because there will still be a spread, and the taller people will presumably grow as they have a relative advantage, but all of us will be higher, and bigger people will take up more space on the Earth and need bigger cars and bigger houses and we’ll, you know, increase our footprint, at a time when collectively we should be reducing it.

You mentioned that the divide between rich and poor could potentially grow bigger. Could you please explain further?


This is huge. And this is the primary reason why we really need to examine each of the things that people want to do to see whether or not what will happen is that those who have the education and the money, which already we know gives their offspring a much more significant advantage in life, and whether or not what we’ll be doing is enabling them not just to give an environmental advantage to their offspring, but also a genetic advantage. Which almost certainly seems to guarantee that we'll start having an underclass of people who are not just environmentally disadvantaged, but also genetically disadvantaged, and so it will seem impossible for them to overcome those disadvantages, and they’ll become a permanent underclass.

On the other side, this technology could prevent diseases or predispositions to certain diseases, and some argue that if this is the case, parents almost have an obligation to use it. What do you think?

Well, that’s why I think we need to not lump all of these different possibilities in together. First, we have to consider the fact that most children are not conceived through IVF and that because IVF is extremely invasive and mostly that invasiveness happens in the lives and the bodies of women, and it also requires a medical intervention that mostly women have to wear the day to day costs of, and also any long-term health consequences of. So, I think there are problems already with thinking about trying to conceive most of the children we have with these sorts of genetic advantages on that ground. But if you remove that ground, you might argue that there is only benefit for individuals and for all of us collectively of being healthier. Of being no longer subject to the risk of diabetes, no longer subject to the risk of heart disease, no longer subject to the risk of Alzheimer’s. That could only seem to be an advantage. But if we start to offer this, what we’re doing is advantaging in the short term people who are undertaking these sort of procedures because they actually suffer a disadvantage at the moment because they’re infertile, or they have a genetic condition going through their families, but eventually what you’ll be doing is advantaging particular people who have the capacity to undertake this, or women who are feeling pressured to undertake this sort of engagement in order to be considered a good mother. So if the normative standard became that it wasn’t really a good parental thing anymore to conceive a child just through sexual intercourse - if you’re only doing the right thing by your child if you terminate any pregnancies conceived of casually, plan a pregnancy, and undertake all of this sort of medical intervention, in order to have the best possible child, with the best possible future health profile. I think as a society we need to think very long and hard about whether we want to make that the normative way of doing things.

Would you have any ideas on how society could regulate this?

Well, it’s extremely difficult because of the problem of reproductive tourism, and that’s why we’re talking about this, because the US, in comparative terms with Australia, is cowboy land. But I certainly think that the first step would be for Australian society to talk about it, and if we believe that these sorts of issues are extremely concerning and profound, such that we would not allow the usage of the technologies in ways that would be detrimental because of the reasons I’ve discussed, then we could discuss this internationally. We have facilities by which nations can talk to each other, in a world where sometimes we try to do things collectively - things like, for instance, banning landmines. We can talk collectively about the cost for all of us if certain people are allowed to use their wealth to pursue reproduction in this fashion, and we might come to an agreement. It’s pretty clear how problematic this could become. It’s not really hard to see how bad it could get, how this could really lead to societies in which some of the things we value most, like equal opportunity, could be destroyed.

And I guess the job of organisations that approve these patents is not really to think about the ethical consequences of their decisions?

Exactly. You know, in peripheral ways, some of the patent laws do have the capacity to strike things out on moral grounds, but I think it’s probably asking patent law to do way too much work. We’re going to need to do this work ourselves, we’re going to need to think about these things and discuss them and try collectively to come to ideas about the most appropriate ways to regulate, outside of existing frameworks that really weren’t designed to deal with the moral complexity of these technologies.

Do you think as a society we’re losing sight of what's the role of good parents, focusing too much on the ability to create the best baby, rather than the importance of raising a child with care and love?


I certainly don’t think we talk enough about the confusion on what it means to be a good parent, and we talk about it in the negative, and I think often we can be confused because the old reasons that prevailed about why you would have children, like the idea that children would look after you when you are older. Children had very concrete roles to play in a society in which life was hard, and children’s labour was needed. And there was no income security and social security. So I think as we’ve moved into this new era where there is such a thing as childhood, and we changed our ideas about the maternal mandate for women, we have become a little bit confused about what are good reasons to have children. So I think that part of the conversation we would be having when we start to talk about whether there are moral obligations to select and enhance one’s children, in line with what technology allows us to do, that would open up a space to discuss what we think the obligations of parents are.


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14 min read

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By Chiara Pazzano
Source: SBS

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Q&A: Designer baby patent 'raises huge ethical issues' | SBS News