The following article appeared as part of Discover magazine’s special issue, in May 1998, about biotechnology and the genetic revolution. Only the opening paragraphs are reproduced here.

Tempting Fates

If you could dictate the content of your kid’s genes, wouldn’t you? Shouldn’t you?

By Robin Marantz Henig

Imagine that your grandchildren can pick exactly how their babies will look, think, and act. Your family curse of breast cancer or cystic fibrosis or early heart attack – not to mention dyslexia, fat thighs, shyness, or male-pattern baldness – will be vanquished in a single stroke. Your great-grandchildren will be as lean, literate, loquacious, and long-lived as their parents want them to be. How does that grab you?

If you think that sounds good, you have plenty of company. More than 40 percent of Americans, according to a March of Dimes survey, think it would be okay to use gene therapy to make their children either more attractive or more intelligent than they were otherwise destined to be. A Gallup poll of British parents found many of them also willing to consider such genetic "enhancement," and for some surprising and rather disconcerting reasons: 18 percent to change a child’s aggression level or remove a predisposition to alcoholism, 10 percent to keep a child from becoming homosexual, and 5 percent to make a child more physically attractive.

At the moment, this genetic equivalent of nip-and-tuck cosmetic surgery exists only in the imagination. After nearly a decade of experimentally transferring genes into human beings with serious disease, the practitioners of gene therapy have yet to cure a single person. Moreover, it is still far from certain that the behavioral traits described above will ever be shown to be genetically "caused." Still, the controversy surrounding the appearance of a cloned sheep in 1997 highlights how fast the field of genetic engineering can move, and how far we are from a public consensus on how such technology should be used. Gene transfer techniques, once perfected, could treat more than just genetic diseases. They could also offer the ultimate form of preventive medicine – or the ultimate form of intrusive, Brave New World eugenics, depending on your point of view.

Few people question the value of correcting a gene for sickle-cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, or, should the relevant genes be found, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, or cancer. Once the technology is perfected, people will probably also not question making that correction at the earliest embryonic stage, or, more likely, even before conception, to be certain that the healthy gene will find its way into every cell in the body as the baby develops.

But altering genes for the sake of appearance or personality is something else again. Is it fair for parents to make such decisions on behalf of their unborn children? If so, which genes should they be allowed to manipulate? Are the risks of genetic manipulation worth taking just to ensure that a child will have curly hair, blue eyes, tall stature, or a slim physique? What about inserting new genes for high IQ? For heterosexuality? For conformity? For optimism? For skin color? Should gene therapy become the vehicle of choice for creating a whole new class of genetically engineered children, custom-made to carry the "good" versions of genes that are thought to influence the way we look or behave?

And when such manipulations become feasible, what will happen to the quintessential American presumption that all men are created equal?

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Last September researchers and ethicists began looking more closely at these questions, and they began imagining the once unimaginable. The National Institutes of Health held its first Gene Therapy Policy Conference, which focused on the pros and cons of altering genes to enhance normal function. Two weeks later the American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsored a colloquium on another aspect of genetic manipulation that so far has been completely off-limits: gene alterations directed not at the somatic, or body, cells (as all such manipulations have been to date) but at the sex, or germ line, cells – meaning eggs, sperm, and very early embryos. Interventions at this stage would change an unborn generation’s genetic endowment in much more profound and permanent ways.

Some conference speakers approached the inevitably paired issues – altering genes for enhancement and altering genes in sex cells – with trepidation. "Before we start doing germ-line gene therapy," said Cynthia Cohen of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., "we need to decide whether we want to change what it is to be human. We need to decide whether there is something about human nature that we shouldn’t change it, even if it could be done."