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Here's how we're going to slide into genetically engineering babies without even noticing

When asked, 83% of Americans say that "changing a baby's genetic characteristics to make the baby more intelligent" is "taking medical advances too far."

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That answer is not terribly surprising.

Straight-up asking if people want to change the building blocks that make their children who they are feels awkward and sets off "are we messing with nature?" alarm bells.

baby embryo egg sperm fetus pregnancy
Doctor is silhouetted as he walks past a poster in a Rome fertility clinic. Alessia Pierdomenico / Reuters

But there are different ways of asking how people feel about making genetic choices that affect who their children are, as host Jamie Metzl pointed out at a 92Y talk on March 10 titled "Can Genius Be Genetically Engineered?" with Steven Pinker, Stephen Hsu, and Dalton Conley.

If you change the question just a little bit, people become more and more likely to make genetic choices that change their children.

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And as those choices accumulate over time, we may eventually be doing the very thing that seemed unimaginable at first: genetically engineering babies to be subjectively "better."

New scenarios

Metzl, the author of a thriller about genetic engineering, suggests assuming you and your partner are going to have a child. But one or both of you carry a genetic mutation that could potentially be passed on, creating a 50% chance that the child will be born with an incurable and fatal illness.

With that knowledge, would you conceive of your child in a natural way; would you (or your partner) get pregnant and then test the fetus and decide how to proceed; or would you do in-vitro fertilization (IVF) on a set of embryos and pick one that didn't carry that disease?

In that case, many would likely choose the IVF option.

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But let's assume that while sequencing the genomes of the embryos you might choose to implant, you can also find out all kinds of other information on disease risk, height, athletic ability, and even IQ (something we don't know the genetic basis for yet, but that researchers at genomics institute BGI, where Hsu is a scientific advisor, are trying to figure out).

Would you want that information if it was already available to you, you just had to decide to look at it?

It might be harder to say no, though many still might think that's not okay.

92Y Genetics discussion
From left: Jamie Metzl, Stephen Hsu, Dalton Conley, and Steven Pinker 92nd Street Y/YouTube

Hsu, a professor of physics at Michigan State University, takes the scenario a few steps further.

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What if, during that IVF process, you could also test for all other known genetic diseases, just to make sure you implanted the healthiest embryo? And what if, during that process, doctors also realized that one embryo would have below average intelligence or would have certain physical struggles? Would you want to know that, to help eliminate some potential difficulties for that child?

"Slowly, things are going to creep [in]," Hsu said. It's that slow creep of eliminating "negative" traits that he thinks could lead to embryo selection — genetically choosing children.

One more step

Embryo selection is still a few steps away from using the latest gene editing technologies to actually flip a few switches to make children more intelligent or physically capable.

And as the group on stage at 92Y agreed, we still don't know which edits we'd want to make if we were going to try to genetically design babies. The technology that would allow us to do that is arguably close to the point where it would be possible, but we still have a lot to learn about how genes code for certain traits and behaviors.

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But many think that we'll get to that point where we better understand genetics and can make those changes. By that point, tweaking the genetic code of embryos might not seem as unnatural.

DNA genes
ktsdesign/Shutterstock

As Hsu said at the discussion, it's very possible that competitive forces could encourage people around the world to try editing their children's genes.

In Asia, Hsu said, "the competition is pretty relentless ... I think, a lot of parents, if they knew they could dial up the intelligence of their kid ... the adoption would be not so negligible, it would actually happen," provided it was safe and effective.

That's a sentiment that's been expressed before, and it's probably not limited to one continent. In the Washington Post last summer, Eugene Volokh wrote that "competitive pressures, on the international level as well as the individual level, are pretty likely to swamp [ethical, philosophical, or religious] objections in practice, at least unless someone shows that the objections are so overwhelmingly compelling that we are willing to risk permanent second-class (fifth-class?) status in order to adhere to them."

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Not everyone agrees. As Harvard psychologist Pinker noted at 92Y, we don't actually adopt every technological advance that we can.

Pinker asked: "Would anyone have predicted in 1957 that jet travel would be no faster in 60 years than it was then?" As he said, "there's no technical barrier to passenger supersonic transport, but society decided we don't like sonic booms and jet fuel is too expensive … We don't have domed cities, we don't have underwater apartments, we don't have nuclear power too cheap to meter."

And when it comes to children, Pinker pointed out that "parents won't even feed their kids genetically modified applesauce."

So would we really genetically modify those children? Maybe, maybe not — but the answer is not as clear as it initially seems.

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Check out the YouTube video of the full discussion here:

Babies
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