Is it time to give up sex? Oh, it has plenty to recommend it; but as a way of making babies it leaves an awful lot to chance. I mean, you might have some pretty good genes, but – let’s face it – some of them aren’t so great. Male pattern baldness, phenylketonuria, enhanced risk of breast cancer: I’m not sure you really want those genetic conditions passed on in the haphazard shuffling of chromosomes after sperm meets egg.

It is already possible to avoid more than 250 grave genetic conditions by genetic screening of few-days-old embryos during in vitro fertilisation (IVF), so that embryos free from the genetic mutation responsible can be identified for implantation. But that usually works solely for diseases stemming from a single gene – of which there are many, though most are rare. The procedure is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and it is generally used only by couples at risk of passing on a particularly nasty genetic disease. Otherwise, why go to all that discomfort, and possibly that expense, when the old-fashioned way of making babies is so simple and (on the whole) fun?

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In The End of Sex, Henry Greely, a law professor and bioethicist at Stanford University, argues that this will change. Thanks to advances in reproductive and genetic technologies, he predicts that PGD will become the standard method of conception in a matter of several decades. (Recreational sex might nonetheless persist.)