The Quest for Designer Children 155
have some, but less than total, control over these forces. Thus, if parents give a child the athletic and musical genes to be a dance wiz, the kid may turn out to be a total klutz. Yes, genes confer an advantage, but do not know(and may never know) what combination of factors yield a dance genius. Parents will need to remember that they may be frustrated when their designer children become persons other than what they have planned. Education and counseling will be needed to help remedy the misplaced expectations of parents and their difficulty in coping with failure.
We also need to remember that the line between therapy and enhancement is blurry. Health is a continuum without a clearly defined stopping point. It is difficult to differentiate among treatment, prevention, and enhancement. We lack an objective definition of “normal.” If we see a correctable condition, most of us want to do something about it Thus, interventions now regarded as enhancements may in the future come to be viewed as therapeutic. If some day we correct the gene responsible for Alzheimer’s disease, it may also be possible to enhance memory.
Parents contemplating the use of genetic engineering must ask themselves: What is“normal”? What is a disability(dwarfism)? What is a social problem(being short)? If genetic therapy gives us the capacity to change height and cure dwarfism, it seems unlikely that society will limit the therapy to a child to be in the first, fifth, or
fiftieth percentile for height as an adult.
AN OPTIMISTIC LOOK TO THE FUTURE
We need not fatalistically accept whatever a child is born with by genetic mixing. In the past, a mother’s and father’s genetic contributions were random. Once an embryo was created, its genetic
character was fixed. I take a dynamic, not a static, view of our nature as humans.