[Technology] Designer Babies?

A man walks up to a counter, and says, "I would like a child, female, with blue eyes, black hair, suitable for a career in gymnastics. If you throw in a lowered chance of  contacting colorectal cancer, I'll allow a few rare genotypes to be added in to keep them in the population." The clerk nods, and gives a script for pickup in three days.

Nine months later, a beautiful blue eyed girl is born. 

Welcome to 2013; Welcome to the future. This is now.

While we all are aware of sex pre-selection via PGD in fertility clinics (developed for use in avoiding sex linked diseases such as muscular dystrophy, but now available for family balancing as well), there is a new patent on the market from genetic testing company, 23andme. HuffPost covered the patent back in April; in short, the company was approved for a patent on "gamete donor selection" for favored phenotypes.

If you haven't heard of 23andme before, I suggest you check it out. For only $99 plus shipping, you can swab yourself and find out which diseases/risks you have and are likely to pass on to your child. You can see if it is even medically possible for you to bear a green eyed child, if you are likely to get Parkinson's when you are older, or if you have the gene that helps coffee effect you more. Thousands of pieces of information can be laid at your finger tips, and if both partners get swabbed, you can predict the chance of many childhood diseases, and even eye/hair colour, on your screen. If you have already conceived a child, you can swab their cheek and find out which, if any, health problems they are more likely to face/pass on.

Another company takes this a little further; GenePeeks, located in New York, will take a woman's cheek swab and compare it to 600 sperm donors. It then emails you back with the top five or ten donors that your dna has the best chance of conceiving a healthy child with. Price tag? $2000. Ouch. But how much money and worry could you save down the line, preventing a deadly disease or brain cancer? For some, this will be worth it. That $2000 covers an independent computer system, and code names, so if you don't want to know if it's your dna or theirs that is high risk for a disease, you don't have to, and there is no medical onus to share.

Add in the current quiet research going on involving artificial wombs and pre-birth correction surgery, and the whole world may look quite a bit different in another hundred years.