The Build-a-Baby Workshop

I’ve never been to a Build-a-Bear workshop. It creeps me out. You’d think that building a teddy bear from scratch—picking the innards and stitches—would be like bringing a kid to a farm to see where hot dogs come from (which incidentally is why I don’t eat pork). But apparently kids like seeing dismembered teddy bears and choosing the type of internal heart-approximated organ their toy should have.

If you don’t think Build-a-Bear is creepy, what about the idea of a Build-a-Baby workshop? Imagine a place where hopeful parents could sit down with a genetic counselor and go on a tour of their genetic material to choose their best traits to pass to their children, or even choose from a catalogue of genes.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that as we learn more about genetics and specific genes, especially what exact DNA sequence makes them “good genes” or “bad genes,” it will be possible for gene therapies to “correct” these “mistakes,” allowing us to design our children.

This happens to a slight degree already. In the USA, people can already opt to select the sex of their baby—although it requires in vitro fertilization. In other countries, especially Europe, this is completely illegal. There, the belief is that genetic favoritism is a slippery slope, and even choosing the sex of a baby could create imbalances in the gene pool and natural order. Although, this has been happening for a long time in some countries without the help of genetic meddling thanks to sex-selected abortion and infanticide (usually of girls).

So what do you think? Is this a slippery slope that should be completely roped off, or is it something that could be monitored and kept in check?

For example, what if we could just ensure our children had good eyesight? As a myopic person married to an equally myopic person, I would jump at the chance to offer my offspring the opportunity to live a life free of glasses, contacts, and that air-puff glaucoma test at the optometrist (at least until they’re much older).

But what if it wasn’t just eyesight correction? What if it became routine to select eye color and after that, skin color? What if we could ensure that children wouldn’t develop autism or other disorders? Will this create a separate class of people whose parents could afford to visit the Build-a-Baby workshop?

This isn’t like a manned mission to Mars. This is like technology becoming self-aware and killing us all. This is actually going to happen.

Where do you stand on this? Are you going to be Ethan Hawke’s parents in GATTACA and make babies the “old-fashioned way” (which I predict will be called “genetic roulette” in the future), or will you put your faith in technology to “correct” your “errors” and make the “perfect” baby that will grow up to belong to a new genetic elite? And most importantly, how soon after implementing gene therapies to make designer babies do you think the zombie apocalypse will happen?

I may have “used” too many quotation “marks” in this “entry.”