So when significant numbers of fertile women begin using IVF, we will know that market-based eugenics has left the launch pad. This could easily expand into positive eugenics where parents choose the best among healthy embryos in an attempt to give their children a better start in life. Most parents want their children to be not only healthy, but happy and successful. The surmise by James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is plausible: “Once you have a way in which you can improve our children, no one can stop it.” Watson wants parents to have access to genetic screening. That would aid negative eugenics but it would make the slope to positive eugenics more slippery.
The long article is interesting throughout. Pointer from Jason Collins. I should note that a recent issue of Technology Review carried the cover story “We Can Now Engineer the Human Race.”
“when significant numbers of fertile women begin using IVF”
Maybe as a cause rather than an effect, but the cause of this driver will be that college and career are structured such that women will freeze eggs for delaying motherhood.
From C.S. Lewis:
“Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and Umits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power.
In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors.
And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes — the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes
extinct — the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects
will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a
whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being
the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great
planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the
future.
The real picture is that of one dominant age — let us suppose the hundredth
century A.D. — which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon biUions of men. There neither is nor can
be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a
power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well aas stronger. In
every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who
follows the triumphal car.
I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent victories is a
good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really
means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen,
the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt,
nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But
the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the
first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of
educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when
we read them — how Plato would have every infant “a bastard nursed in a bureau”, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women,’ and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry^ — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. “
My wife and have already done this. We had both used 23 and me and discovered a rare disease we for which we were carriers.
Using PGD we chose only embryos that didn’t have the mutation, or only had one copy. We now have a son.
However, I don’t think this will become so widespread just yet. Missing from this discussion is the difficulty of having a child through IVF. It involves months of daily injections which becomes more painful over time. It often doesn’t work the first time, and Miscarriages are a big risk.
We are thinking for the next child we might not do this. The chance for our child is 25%, of having two copies of the gene. Genetic councilors assured us that it meant a 25% chance of getting the disease. But this is a new frontier, and most doctors and councilors are completely ignorant of how genetics actually works. So it wasn’t true, I did my own research and found a paper saying that both copies of the gene was 40x more prominent in the population than the actual disease. So the actually chance of having a child with the condition is 1 in 160.
Point it’s messy, hard and will continue to be for a long time.
Do you know if there are any biological costs of IVF?
No, or so it seems. IVF has been done long enough that we have multiple generations. Most of the early concerns about birth defects turned out to be unfounded. People doing IVF were older and thus had a higher mutational load, once adjusted the rates were nearly identical. There did get hits on some rare defects, but those are most likely blips, when you P test for lots of rare events with a large data set you get hits, but they are probably noise.
apart from the costs to the other embryos, you mean…