NICOLE MILLER/Daily Bruin Chancellor Albert
Carnesale makes his opening remarks during a panel
discussion regarding genetics and the ability to choose the makeup
of one’s child.
By Chris Young
Daily Bruin Reporter
A decade from now, couples may be able to go to a fertility
clinic with a “shopping list” to choose character
traits of their future child, such as intelligence level, physical
ability and body type.
A panel of UCLA faculty debated the social, ethical and legal
consequences of these techniques Tuesday in Covel Commons, using as
a springboard for discussion the fact that parents can already
choose an embryo’s gender.
“Gender selection occurs fairly broadly,” said
moderator Greg Stock, director of the Program on Medicine,
Technology and Society in the UCLA School of Medicine. “It
occurs quite frequently in India, China, Korea, a number of
cultures where if you are only going to have a few children, males
are generally preferred.”
The panel was divided on whether gender selection should be
legal. Panel member Alan DeCherney, chair of the UCLA Department of
Obstetrics and Gynecology, condoned it, but said if the population
size started to lean toward one sex, the government should make
regulations.
But panelist Ruth Roemer, a professor at the School of Public
Health, said regulation would require a review process for
couples’ reasons for wanting a boy or girl, which would be
difficult to regulate and also an invasion of privacy.
Techniques for gender selection will eventually be able to test
for additional traits. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which has
been used for more than a decade, detects the gender of test-tube
fertilized embryos, so that an embryo of the desired sex can be
implanted in the uterus.
PGD lets couples screen embryos for diseases such as cystic
fibrosis or Huntington’s disease, and to opt whether to
discard those embryos. While all the panelists approved of this
use, they disagreed on whether PGD should be used to test for
character traits such as intelligence or artistic ability ““ a
possibility in coming years.
A technique called sperm sorting allows couples to choose the
sex of their child by letting only the sperm of one sex fertilize
the egg. Sperm sorting avoids the ethical problem of discarding
living embryos as in PGD, as it dictates the child’s gender
before the egg is fertilized.
DeCherney said a form of sperm selection has been in place for
years at sperm banks that can determine the sex of the sperm that
will inseminate the egg.
Panel member Eric Vilian, UCLA human genetics and pediatrics
professor, pointed out that choosing sperm is an extension of how
humans have historically mated.
“People choose their own mate, usually a person whose
character traits resemble their own,” Vilian said.
For example, he said, couples usually have the same
socioeconomic background and level of intelligence.
Several panelists said though there are a lot of discussions
about the morality of these tests, not much has been said about the
impact of the parents’ decisions on the child born. Panelist
and UCLA law professor Steven Munzer said if the child were told he
or she was “chosen” or “selected” above
other possible children, that would have profound effects on the
child.
“If a child was selected from other embryos because it had
a predisposition for high intelligence, the child would feel
pressure to live up to that standard,” Munzer said.