Summary
Say a couple wants to have a baby, but they’re infertile. Or they have a weird genetic disease. Or they’re gay. Or they aren’t a couple at all—a single mom wants to go it alone. Right now, these would-be parents have three options: IVF, adoption, or surrogacy. All three are terrific methods, but they’re also imperfect: inconvenient, expensive, and risky. Soon these practices may become more obsolete. According to Henry Greely, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, we’re only 20 years away from couples birthing the babies of their dreams. To do so, women will simply need to give scientists samples of their skin cells. From there, the cells will turn into eggs, then hundreds of embryos—allowing parents to choose which baby they’d prefer to grow in the womb. No sex required.
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GOOD: Why is now the time to talk about sexless reproduction?
Henry Greely: People have been talking about selecting babies for a long time, but it was always theoretical. Once you can cheaply review all the genetic information, and once you can easily and cheaply create eggs, everything changes. Both technologies—cheap genome sequencing and induced pluripotent stem cells [see sidebar]—are progressing enormously and attracting lots of money for reasons that have nothing to do with reproduction. When they come together for reproduction, I think they will change our world. They will change our species.
Won’t there be political and cultural resistance?
It will be used first by people who are infertile. There are people absolutely desperate to have genetic children, but can’t because of a childhood disease, a birth defect, an accident, cancer, or age. That’s a huge and very politically attractive market. Nobody will want to tell people, “I’m sorry, but we are going to ban the procedure that would let you, who had testicular cancer in your youth, become a genetic father.”
But I think it will spread as more people become confident that it is safe. One to two percent of babies have a serious genetic disease. How much is it worth as a parent to avoid that one to two percent risk? If, as I expect in the long run, the process becomes free, then I think we’ll see lots and lots of parents choose this as the way they want to conceive their babies.
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