Tell ’Em That It’s Human Nature

BY Lucy Modra

North Balwyn Primary School, 2050:

A navy BMW SUV pulls up outside the school. Out tumbles five-year-old Jack, blond, blue-eyed and tall for his age, with a preternatural talent for kicking a footy. He runs off to meet Jesse, Max and Jem, who share his height, blond hair, blue eyes and agility. They’re not related – actually, Max’s parents migrated from Chile ten years ago – but their parents all shop at GeneticallyBetterKids.com.

Rex slopes into school at 9:15. He’s always late, because it’s difficult to walk with two webbed feet and a pair of wings weighing you down. Conceived by his parents whilst they were on an acid bender, Rex also has scales on his back and claws. His parents thought they would help him fight off the giant purple lizards in their living room. The court case continues.

Nightmare? Or remarkably similar to the North Balwyn prep class of 2007?

Free-market genetic enhancement, as described in the scenario above, is closer to becoming a reality than we may realise. As the Herald Sun warned on 16 July 2007: “Desperate Australian couples are buying sperm from anonymous ‘designer donors’ through overseas websites.” The newspaper cautioned that ethicists “…worry that detailed online menus let parents try to craft their child’s characteristics before conception.”

But why, exactly, are they worried? I think that free-market genetic enhancement would make very little difference to life as we know it. It certainly raises some interesting questions around equality, parental autonomy and the definitive features of a parent. But these are not new problems – they are very familiar political issues reframed in a genetic context. Opponents of genetic enhancement also tend to overestimate the contribution of genes to human behaviour and personality (or underestimate the significance of ‘nurture’, that is, environmental factors), leading to an exaggerated sense of how genetic enhancement will change the world.

One potentially troubling aspect of genetic enhancement is the thought that if you buy genes rather than handing them down the ‘natural’ way, it’s not really your child. After all, if you buy enough genes, it’s possible that your child would have more in common, genetically speaking, with his or her school friends or PE teacher than with you. But is genetic relatedness – the percentage of genes shared between parents and kids – that important? We’re well inured to adoption, and over ten thousand Australian kids were conceived with donor eggs or sperm. When a child is conceived with donor sperm, Australian law recognises the partner of the woman who bore the child as the child’s actual father. And that’s not to mention the millions of cases of false paternity over millennia of human civilisation. Banning genetic enhancement cannot save the ‘family’, because ‘family’ never was as simple as mum, dad, and their genetically derived sons and daughters.

Choosing genes for your child does seem to make childbearing more like buying a dog or a cat: “I liked this one, so I bought him”. All family resemblance could be lost at parents seek to iron out perceived genetic flaws. But just as pets have an uncanny resemblance to their owners, genetically enhanced children would likely be very similar to their own parents. Think about it. Sporty couples would want tall, coordinated kids. Musical couples would want kids with perfect pitch. Hipster couples would want pale, skinny kids. In this way, parents would likely buy genes very similar to those they could pass on to their child through actual sex. Jack’s parents probably had a pretty decent chance of having a good-looking, coordinated kid. But they forked out $300,000 to make certain this was the case.

It’s also feared that free-market genetic enhancement would have a homogenising effect, as parents would all choose socially acceptable traits for their children. Like Jack, Max, Jesse and Jem’s parents, we’d all choose genes for height, sporting talent and extroversion, and thereby squeeze out minority groups.

Or would we? As we’ve seen, parents are likely to choose genes that reflect their own values and heritage, even if these traits aren’t popular or mainstream. In fact, minority groups already use genetic technology to preserve distinctive traits: deaf parents currently use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to choose deaf embryos, and dwarf couples choose dwarf embryos. And just as branded clothing has fallen from popularity in favour of individual retro pieces, some parents would pay for unusual genetic traits. Sure, the majority of parents would buy their genes at Target, but we could rely on the Fiona Scanlans of the future to design distinctive children.

It’s true that old-fashioned procreation enforces variety – short alongside tall, crooked teeth alongside straight teeth, extroverts and introverts, dyslexics and linguistic prodigies – in a way that we would not choose for our children. Few parents would choose ugly and shy genes for their child just so that they could experience unrequited love, struggle and longing. But the idea that genetic enhancement could eliminate suffering is ludicrous. Suffering is borne of our interactions with our environment and other humans. As the poet William Wordsworth wrote in 1842: “Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark / And shares the nature of infinity.”

And although this tension between the desire to preserve human variety and the desire to prevent suffering is fascinating, it’s certainly not a new problem. It echoes the contemporary dilemma of ‘developing’ ancient villages: should we protect a small Chinese village’s unique culture, if their way of life involves hunger and disease?

Designing a child, rather than just having one, sits uneasily with the idea of unconditional love for a child. All parents are supposed to believe that their baby is the most beautiful of babies, because it helps them put up with its unrelenting screaming and pooing over the first 18 months. Would parents look more critically at their genetically enhanced child to see if they got their money’s worth? It would certainly encourage parents to have very specific expectations of their child: if Jack’s parents paid for a tall, coordinated child they would expect him to perform well on a basketball court. But kids are already messed up by their parents’ expectations, be they too ambitious or confining. It’s just that currently parental expectations are based upon the parents’ or siblings’ abilities, rather than their (equally misleading) genetic thumbprint.

What about parents who make irresponsible choices, like Rex’s parents? Their decision to give Rex webbed feet and wings is unfortunately both permanent and propagable – surely this is a problem? I have two responses to this concern.

First, emphasising the permanence of genetic choices underplays the influence of other decisions parents make for their children. Consider for a moment your early childhood hobbies. These certainly had a formative influence on your personality and skills, and you almost certainly didn’t get to choose them yourself. I’ve often wondered if my life would be fundamentally different (more graceful, less beset with embarrassing dance floor incidents) if mum had assented to ballet lessons when I was four.

Again, it’s clear that genes are only a part of the human picture. From the moment of birth, and even earlier, children are developing skills and preferences through interactions with their environment. Purchasing an expensive set of desirable genes for a child will not protect him or her from the effects of shoddy child-rearing, because environmental deprivation reliably thwarts genetic potential. Malnourished children are short, regardless of their height potential. Paris Hilton could buy all the smart genes in the world for her child and still struggle to produce a mathematical wunderkind.

Second, the question of appropriate constraints on parental decisions is interesting, but it’s certainly not a new political problem. This debate is already played out in countless guises: compulsory education laws; parents’ right to home-school their child; mandatory vaccination schedules.

Another concern about free-market genetic enhancement that mirrors an age-old political dilemma is the probability of creating a ‘genetic underclass’ who can’t afford enhancement. In a genetic free market, desirable traits would be expensive – having a child like Jack would cost more than Naomi – and financial success would perpetuate itself genetically. There are obvious parallels with the debate over private education, and its potential to entrench both privilege and poverty.

But the alternative to free-market genetic enhancement has its own problems. As illustrated in the film Gattaca, state-funded genetic decision-making could easily degenerate into eugenics, with people being genetically engineered for certain roles in society at the expense of freedom and human variety. (Would free-market genetic enhancement preserve the freedom to be mediocre in a job you love?) Again, the tousle between free-market genetic enhancement and appropriate state-enacted restraints thereon is a very old political problem dressed up in genetic pyjamas.

Finally, let’s not fool ourselves that procreation the old-fashioned way is completely random. Terrifyingly enough, we already make decisions about the type of children we want when we choose our partners. Even eugenics existed long before the sequencing of the human genome.

And the argument most convincing to me? At the ripe old age of 22 I was diagnosed with an occult form of spina bifida. All I have to show for it is a small pink patch of skin over my lower back and a slightly dodgy left hip. Spina bifida is one of the conditions currently screened for using prenatal testing – so if my parents had used prenatal genetic testing, they could have selectively aborted me! But then I reflect on the thousand or so more mundane reasons why I might never have lived (my dad deciding to stay in Perth and not meeting my mum, my granddad being killed in World War II before my mum was born…) and I realise that genetic technology just isn’t that special.

Genetic enhancement will become a reality, possibly in our lifetime. We would do well to recognise the familiar elements of the dilemmas it presents, rather than losing our heads in a Gattaca-fuelled frenzy.