On Genetic Engineering and Designer Babies

It wasn’t a long time ago that I and a friend were getting into a creative discussion at 4:20 pm in my hostel room at IIM Ahmedabad. We were both engineers and management graduates, so finding a gap in society and solving it, or at least thinking about the future of humanity seemed like a good consumption of our time. And I, for a long time, was really interested in creating a so-called perfect baby.

I was enthused by genetics when I read about Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel as a 10-year-old. To this date, I think of the pea experiment as the most simple and eye-opening experiment conducted. And to think that Mendel did it in a religious home as a religious servant still leaves me wonderstruck. Charles Darwin, on the other hand, as much as I remember, was far more of a travel junkie, challenged religious beliefs that humans are a product of evolution and nothing more. Today, these concepts are so widely accepted it is not so difficult to accept them, but to put myself in their shoes I cannot help but respect how courageous they had to be.

(Another fun fact about Mendel, from what I remember, it was not until many years after his death that his experiments were lauded in the scientific community as any sort of achievement. Wild.)

Anyway, coming back to my interest in creating the perfect baby - I had a great psychology class during my MBA, it was called Games People Play. The first few classes had my whole attention, the instructor was going through studies about what kind of actions a parent takes that inculcate certain personality traits in their child. It is interesting right, if I knew I wanted an extroverted, kind, and generous child, I could basically follow certain steps, raise them a certain way, and teach them certain things to create what I wanted.

The other fascinating question which I’m sure alludes to the best of the minds is the question of nature vs. nurture. It is only obvious that our future generations will be stronger, smarter, and faster than us due to natural selection and evolution. It is so interesting, if someone could tell me how to create a baby that ticked all my boxes I would not wait another ten years to have one. 

So during the 4:20 discussion, we started talking about designer babies. Now, to be honest, I don’t recall the entirety of the discussion, but I remember how I was telling my friend about experiments being conducted all over the world to modify the genetic structures of future babies to create, say, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, child. At that point, I wasn’t sure if the designer traits were purely physical, but when I think about it, it is the genetic build of a personality and intelligence, EQ, that I seem to want in a child.

No, I currently do not have any motherly instincts except fawning over cute children, and no, I will not create children solely as a way for scientific experimentation, but it is interesting, right?

I do believe, intrinsically, we all look for partners (or parents of our children) to have certain traits (ahem intelligence, health, and wealth) because somewhere we want to create children that will outperform the best. But what if, we could encode the traits into the children through genetic engineering, and we could find partners just for companionship and sex? Hmm.

Now, I am currently reading Hacking Darwin by Jamie Metzl and I cannot keep it down. In the first 50 pages, he introduced a scenario where we could choose the most dominant genes - healthy, intelligent, disease-free, living for several years - and we can pick and choose which goes ahead. The child would be basically ours, creating them in an IVF but we could choose which of our dominant traits we would like to progress into the baby. I cannot stress enough how much I would like that to happen. It would be a great leap for humanity, it would speed up evolution, and we would be taller, younger, and smarter. 

As a ten-year-old, when I first began reading about Darwin and Mendel, my mind was obviously too small to understand the implications of their science, and where it would lead me as a 27-year-old, but god damn do I want the perfect baby.