George Dvorsky at Sentient Developments points us to an op-ed at New Scientist titled “Fears over ‘designer’ babies leave children suffering”. The author writes:

Such fears are misplaced: IVF-PGD is little use for creating designer babies. You cannot select for traits the parents don’t have, and the scope for choosing specific traits is very limited. What IVF-PGD is good for is ensuring children do not end up with disastrous genetic disorders.

I, along with dozens of prominent scientists in the field, disagree — IVF-PGD would be useful for creating designer babies. Would would would. To boost this position, the author links another New Scientist article… (one that he probably edited, being biology features editor) which seems to contradict him:

Part of the problem is that only one or two cells are available for screening. Until recently this greatly restricted the tests that could be done. However, new ways of amplifying DNA are making it possible to do hundreds of tests. That means clinics will be able to screen for a much wider range of harmful mutations - and for desirable variants too.

Only one paragraph that I can find appears to support the op-ed author’s idea that IVF-PGD couldn’t be used for designer babies:

How much further can selection go? What of that object of tabloid hysteria, the “designer baby”? Will we one day be able to ask for a tall, musical, blue-eyed boy or a dark-haired girl? Even if regulatory authorities allow us to use PGD to select desirable gene variants, there are major snags. For starters, IVF typically generates fewer than 10 embryos per cycle. This means parental choice will be very limited. “I don’t think anyone in their right mind would ever go through IVF to select the hair colour of their offspring,” says Yuri Verlinsky of the Reproductive Genetics Institute, Chicago, one of the pioneers of PGD.

This Verlinsky quote is really confusing. Elsewhere, Verlinsky has been quoted as saying that PGD-IVF could lead to a “disease-free society” (a sloppy way of saying a “genetic disease free society”), but he claims that people won’t use it to choose the hair color of their offspring. His quote doesn’t make it clear whether he’s talking about his opinion or the technical challenge. Also, the author of that (non op-ed) piece seriously breaks journalistic neutrality by calling designer babies an “object of tabloid hysteria” when many prominent scientists in IVF take the idea seriously. It’s like the contributors at New Scientist are on misguided vigilante missions to make emerging technologies sound more palatable to the mainstream.

In any case, the limitation on the number of blastocysts can be circumvented using multi-generational in vitro embryo selection, which Verlinsky should have already considered, and if he hasn’t, he has tunnel vision. So he either 1) is scientifically uncreative in his own field, or 2) knows that more advanced PGD-IVF could be used for designer babies, and just wants to keep it a secret from the public because he wants to get them to accept the technology incrementally, like boiling a crab in water that increases in temperature only slowly.

In general, I think the op-ed is a shoddy example of memetic engineering — the author is trying to distract attention away from the designer baby controversy to help promote PGD-IVF for eliminating genetic diseases. Good motive, but somewhat dishonest, because I doubt that even the author believes that PGD-IVF would be useless for designer babies.

Speaking of “designer babies”, I hate the term. As James Hughes said in WIRED, “the term “designer babies” is an insult to parents, because it basically says parents don’t have their kids’ best interests at heart”. How about just “PGD-IVF babies”, a non-catchy term, because it shouldn’t become catchy and be used to discriminate against children born using the tech or parents who decide to use it? This would be in the same vein of Aubrey calling his project “Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence” to make it deliberately difficult to misunderstand. The project of SIAI could become, “the Engineering of a Human-Values Reflective Optimizing Process”.

Also, we must remember that New Scientist lacks credibility. Instead of reading New Scientist, how about PhysOrg and Eurekalert? Or Next Big Future?

Either way, the whole issue matters not, because designer babies are largely irrelevant and will be eclipsed by things like strongly self-improving superintelligence and molecular manufacturing. See “Evolution by Choice” by Mitchell Howe.