Who Gets the Good Genes?
BY ROBERT WRIGHT In the 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned future childbirth as a very orderly affair. At the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in accordance with orders from the Social Predestination Room, eggs were fertilized, bottled and put on a conveyor belt. Nine months later, the embryos--after "decanting"--were babies. Thanks to state-sponsored brainwashing, they would grow up delighted with their genetically assigned social roles--from clever, ambitious alphas to dim-witted epsilons.
Ever since publication of Huxley's dystopian novel, this has been the standard eugenics nightmare: government social engineers subverting individual reproductive choice for the sake of an eerie social efficiency. But as the age of genetic engineering dawns, the more plausible nightmare is roughly the opposite: that a laissez-faire eugenics will emerge from the free choices of millions of parents. Indeed, the only way to avoid Huxleyesque social stratification may be for the government to get into the eugenics business.
Huxley's scenario made sense back in 1932. Some American states were forcibly sterilizing the "feebleminded," and Hitler had praised these policies in Mein Kampf. But the biotech revolution that Huxley dimly foresaw has turned the logic of eugenics inside out. It lets parents choose genetic traits, whether by selective abortion, selective reimplanting of eggs fertilized in vitro or--in perhaps just a few years--injecting genes into fertilized eggs. In Huxley's day eugenics happened only by government mandate; now it will take government mandate--a ban on genetic tinkering--to prevent it.
An out-and-out ban isn't in the cards, though. Who would try to stop parents from ensuring that their child doesn't have hemophilia? And once some treatments are allowed, deciding where to draw the line becomes difficult.
The Bishop of Edinburgh tried. After overseeing a British Medical Association study on bioethics, he embraced genetic tinkering for "medical reasons," while denouncing the "Frankenstein idea" of making "designer babies" with good looks and a high IQ. But what is the difference? Therapists consider learning disabilities to be medical problems, and if we find a way to diagnose and remedy them before birth, we'll be raising scores on IQ tests. Should we tell parents they can't do that, that the state has decided they must have a child with dyslexia? Minor memory flaws? Below-average verbal skills? At some point you cross the line between handicap and inconvenience, but people will disagree about where.
If the government does try to ban certain eugenic maneuvers, some rich parents will visit clinics in more permissive nations, then come home to bear their tip-top children. (Already, British parents have traveled to Saudi Arabia to choose their baby's sex in vitro, a procedure that is illegal at home.) Even without a ban, it will be upper-class parents who can afford pricey genetic technologies. Children who would in any event go to the finest doctors and schools will get an even bigger head start on health and achievement.
This unequal access won't bring a rigid caste system a la Brave New World. The interplay between genes and environment is too complex to permit the easy fine-tuning of mind and spirit. Besides, in vitro fertilization is nobody's idea of a good time; even many affluent parents will forgo painful invasive procedures unless horrible hereditary defects are at stake. But the technology will become more powerful and user friendly. Sooner or later, as the most glaring genetic liabilities drift toward the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, we will see a biological stratification vivid enough to mock American values.
Enter the government. The one realistic way to avoid this nightmare is to ensure that poor people will be able to afford the same technologies that the rich are using. Put that way, it sounds innocent, but critics will rightly say it amounts to subsidizing eugenics.
State involvement will create a vast bioethical quagmire. Even if everyone magically agrees that improving a child's memory is as valid as avoiding dyslexia, there will still be things taxpayers aren't ready to pay for--genes of unproven benefit, say, or alterations whose downsides may exceed the upside. (The tendency of genes to have more than one effect--pleiotropy-- seems to be the rule, not the exception.) The question will be which techniques are beyond the pale. The answers will change as knowledge advances, but the arguments will never end.
In Brave New World, state-sponsored eugenics was part of a larger totalitarianism, a cultural war against family bonds and enduring romance and other quaint vestiges of free reproductive choice. The novel worked; it left readers thinking that nothing could be more ghastly than having government get into the designer-baby business. But if this business is left to the marketplace, we may see that government involvement, however messy, however creepy, is not the creepiest alternative.
© 1999 TIME Magazine
Última Atualização: 23/Set/99
