It's actually very beautiful when you can't conceive on your own, you can actually go to the doctors and with science you can create a child.
Is it more ethical to edit embryos or to screen a lot of embryos and throw them away? I don't know the answer.
Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children.
The time to talk about it in schools and churches and magazines and debate societies is now. If you wait, five years from now the gene doctor will be hanging out the MAKE A SMARTER BABY sign down the street.
genetic engineering to improve a baby's genes
Each year thousands of embryos, no bigger than the head of a pin, are created in the process of in vitro fertilization, with the support of Congress, by the way.
My own field, the prevention of genetic disorders in babies, has been possible only because of humane work on animals.
People who are infertile will be able to have their own genetic children. So may same sex couples, since it may well be possible to make eggs from a man's skin cells or sperm from a woman's.
In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.
It will save the health care system a lot of money. You don't need to prevent the births of very many really sick babies to pay for hundreds or thousands of attempts at making babies through easy PGD.
It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly... this was the way to go in the human species.
It's inevitable that we'll have some form of designer children, fueled not just by the science but by parents' hard-wired desire to give their children every advantage.
Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
