Tomorrow's People by Susan Greenfield

Author:Susan Greenfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141926087
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

Imagine that a future father gives his baby daughter chromosome 47, version 2.0, a top-of-the-line model with a dozen therapeutic gene modules. By the time she grows up and has a child of her own, she finds version 2.0 downright primitive. Her three-gene anticancer module pales beside the eight-gene cluster of the new version 5.9, which better regulates gene expression, targets additional cancers, and has fewer side effects. The anti-obesity module is pretty much the same in both versions, but 5.9 features a whopping nineteen antivirus modules instead of the four she has and an anti-aging module that can maintain juvenile hormone levels for an extra decade and retain immune function longer too. The daughter may be too sensible to opt for some of the more experimental modules for her son, but she cannot imagine giving him her antique chromosome and forcing him to take the drugs she uses to compensate for its shortcomings. As far as reverting to the pre-therapy, natural state of 23 chromosome pairs, well, only Luddites would do that to their kids.

So the door would seem to be open for prospective parents to eliminate single genes from a foetus – the ‘designer child’ – or to survey a portfolio of desirable genes in the hope of cherry-picking desirable traits – the ‘virtual child’. Sinister though such eugenics might appear, Gregory Stock defends the idea, arguing that different people would value different traits in their offspring, thereby preserving diversity in society; at the same time if, say, the IQ of everyone was enhanced, then that would ensure that the playing field was actually more level than in our current very divergent society, not less. Moreover, assuming that germ-line engineering were safe and free of side effects, what parents would not want to help their children as best they could? How would such a strategy differ from paying for extra tuition, or sending them to the best school you can afford? The values and the much-hoped-for outcome would be the same, only the method would differ.

Two big problems that cannot be argued away easily, however, and which are not tractable to pure technology, are first the misapprehension about what gene manipulation might do, especially with respect to mental functions, and secondly an effective speciation between the haves and have-nots worldwide. The idea of designer and virtual children is predicated on a clear understanding of the relation between gene and mental trait. Yet we have seen that such a link is far from obvious. True, we can tackle an aberrant gene in the hope of alleviating a disorder, but it by no means follows that by adding a gene we can enhance a normal function; even if we could, we might well change a host of other brain functions as well, as many different types of proteins were made, all interacting in the individual brain in ways that could not have been predicted.

The second problem is the worldwide implication of genetic enhancement. Even if the process were cheap enough

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