Be Mains Ready

Approach:

• Define designer babies, briefly explain with an example
• Discuss the merits of designer babies
• Discuss the demerits of designer babies.
• Conclude suitably

Fodder Points

• Designer babies: The term “Designer Baby” was taken from “Designer clothing”. Similar to the way clothes can be designed according to our preferences, the Designer babies envisages Genetic Engineering of Babies where their genetic makeup is pre-selected during the fetal development stage of life.
• The goal of this process is to eradicate specific defects which are present in the child’s genome for eg: defective mitochondria which can be cured by gene editing involving a 3-parent-child.

As with all novel technologies, there are some pros as well as cons of having a designer baby.

Merits of designer babies:

• Increases life expectancy: By editing out an unborn baby’s defective genes and only retaining the healthy genes, the baby will grow up healthier. Therefore, you may increase their overall life expectancy.
• Treatment for incurable diseases: It might help prevent genetic diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s Disease, down syndrome, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, and many others.
• Ease of living: Instead of pushing the child to study hard and do well in the academic field, his/her's mental capabilities can be enhanced before the child is even born.
• Domino effect in Medical science: Designer babies will be possible by advancement in Gene-editing technology, which in turn can lead to new advancements in other areas of medical science.
• Treats societal discrimination: Physical attributes of a person like colour, physical makeup etc. sometimes are the reason for prejudice in society. By genetic engineering of a child, these physical attributes can be easily modified.

Demerits of designer babies:

• Safety issue: The technology used is not 100% safe yet.
  
  • It is only in the experimental stages at this point.
  • Genetics are not always a hundred per cent sure, which means that it is very likely possible that error may come up at some point in the future in case of designer babies
  • Also, an accidental error could give rise to some new form of illness
• Against the rights of the child. With the process of creating a designer baby, essentially there is in change the life and mind of a living human being without taking the person’s permission or choice, as a foetus is no way in a position to give its consent.
• Social disparity: Designer babies would most likely be better looking, smarter, etc. This would create “classes” between designer and non-designer babies.
  
  • Also, most people will seek out good-looking, intelligent babies with other optimum characteristics, everyone will be relatively similar.
• Ethical dilemma: It is almost the same as carrying out an abortion when you have plenty of choices to eliminate the unwanted ones.
  
  • Sometimes parents do it for money they will get as compensation for donating the stem cells and have no thought whatsoever of the baby.
• Genetic doping: Allowing designer babies may encourage Gene doping. Genetic doping involves inserting DNA for the purpose of enhancing athletic performance.
• Bio-Weapon: Designer babies can lead to a scenario where a human can be reared like animals so that it can lead to the formation of genetic bioweapon.
• Disruption in human evolution: Designer babies will bring an irreversible change in human evolution, as till now human are evolved on the basis of natural selection,

Genetic engineering is a novel concept, which holds immense possibilities that can help mankind beyond imagination, but such type of interventions should be assimilated in human life till the extent they provide ease of humanity not the destruction of it.