I want a glowing kitty!
Where can I buy one of these magical beasts?

Betty was pretty firm about our baby being human
I said we should give him wings and nice prehensile tail
He could travel with the circus making money, making friends with clowns
Betty said that's stupid and for God's sake would you turn that TV down?

I like (ironically) all the concern over designer babies, when at this point we would be lucky to be able to remove/repair known genetic defects..

Like we have any idea that switching acattg to acaaga transforms a stupid jock into an awesome smart kid.. (I mean it did for me, but who knows for everyone else)

@Annalee Newitz: Yeah this idea has been floating around for a while, I remember talking about this in some form in the late 80's in my late teens. I remember when I saw Gattaca and thought to myself, now everyone is going to start believing this and believe that it's going to happen in the next 5 years or so. Well, it hasn't and I honestly believe that it's not going to happen in my lifetime. I'm not an expert in this science and maybe you can answer this, right now this science has gotten to that exaggerated state that so many want to report on, is it really a science that is that far ahead? With this type of science I would think we would get more premature reporting of cures for HIV and AIDS or neuromuscular diseases. I wouldn't think they would spend that valuable "publicity" for the "sci-fi" effect as opposed to what we need right now from this area of science.

From what little I understand about new genetics (Jumping Genes and micro RNA) that "designer" babies will be self defeating because nature is a better, more efficient and faster genetic designer than man currently is.

One can attempt to supercharge a kid, but there is nothing that says that those genes will be used. Also we don't know how these new genes would react with existing genes. The drawbacks of uber kids is that they could end up like Nexus Six replicants ("the star that burns twice as bright...")

@ManchuCandidate: I don't think Nature is faster, but I would bet that its a hell of a lot better, in the case that it will knock off the stuff that isn't good by natural selection and for us engineers will just toss stuff together and our best guess will come out. Plus we won't have the long term knowledge of genetics at the beginning.

@Log1c:
True for complicated mammals, but for rats and smaller (bacterium etc), it is faster.

@ManchuCandidate: For a second I read that "complicated for mammals, but for rats"...
And I thought well what does he have against rats.

Pretty much anything with a short generational cycle works well for gene studies..

So quit your whining and learn some science, bitches.
I'm getting that tattooed on my bicep.

Designer anything is ultimately pointless insofar as we've transcended evolution with our intelligence - it's now more important and more effective to pass pure information on to future generations than it is to pass genes on. If we do anything with our own evolutionary path, it should be only to further facilitate the transference of pure knowledge.

Oh for pete's sake, make my teet grind and head explode whyntcha?

We don't know how HOX regulates body pattern, and we're going to design an organism? BS. We may be able to stick a gene into the sequence, but it like kids dropping matches into a bottle with funny smelling stuff into it and then retiring to a (hopefully) safe distance to see if anything goes boom.

We don't know (and I suspect vastly underestimate) the place of mDNA in the game or of epigenetic regulation of gene expression. (Is the amount of gene expression regulatory activity through epigenetic mediation evolutionarily designed to increase ontogenetic variety in evolutionarily "stressed" environments? Do epigenetic alterations of gene expression regulatory activity slide into germ plasm, rather than being restricted to non reproductively active tissues?)

I read a "science writer" article that defined epigenetic marker as a "chemical coating" on the genetic code, just two days ago. These people are making the public more ignorant, not less. More inclined to suspect and fear science, not less. When possible they should be fired, and their editors tarred and featherd and then fired.

What about people with the glowy hair? So much for sex in the dark :p

@ManchuCandidate: "nature is a better, more efficient and faster genetic designer than man currently is"

If we can "design" babies to not have Down syndrome, or autism, lower risks of leukemia and other cancers, Alzheimer's, you bet a lot of parents would want it. Nature doesn't always deal us a fair card.

I want an Armani baby, now! But just as an accessory item.

@ManchuCandidate: The problem with that argument is that in most civilized countries we have essentially eliminated natural selection. If you look at the birth rates, smart socially responsible people have fewer children than less intelligent socially irresponsible people. We are actually devolving (think idiocracy), and in the absence of external influence would need this sort of thing to push our gene pool where we want it to go.

@Gann:
We barely understand how the billions upon billions of combinations will interact and it will take years if not centuries before we can mess with our DNA without screwing up.

I'd rather use macro means to modify our genetics like loosen safety rules on consumer products and fight more wars just to thin out the ranks than micro means such as tinkering with DNA (I really don't want humanity to fight more wars, but I'm willing to loosen product safety rules (ie: Darwin Awards.))

@ManchuCandidate: I couldn't agree more, I just don't see it happening. I just saw on the news a large allocation of $ to lower the number of teens dying in car wrecks each year. It sounds harsh, but automobile accidents are one of the last effective means of removing someone from the gene pool before reproduction.

Of course, it is a slippery slope. On one hand, I am all for genetic diversity. The more people you have the more possible genetic combination there are, the easier mankind can adapt to things like mass outbreaks of disease. On the other hand, runaway population growth in the face of our current environmental situation gives you irresponsible people having the majority of the children.

At the very least I would like to see less childproofing of the adult world. If you do something stupid, you should get hurt or possibly die. You should not get filthy rich suing others for your own stupidity. You should live (or not) as a warning for others to not do what you did.

Just to play the true devils advocate, what do you think would happen on the macro scale if we created a human hunting season?

@Gann:
We do have human hunting season. It's called war.

The problem with deciding who is irresponsible and who is not often becomes a religious/political issue and like religious/political issue it gets real ugly real fast.

Nature works slowly (than what we humans want) but it is working. The obesity epidemic for instance. It used to be adults were the ones who got fat.

@ManchuCandidate: While war does kill alot of people, it is not an evolutionary influence on the individual level. You could call it survival of the fittest between ideologies, or factions but not of people.

AnnaLee, it's not that it can't be done but is how close it brings us to "now that we can, let's try this". It's science.

As many have said, Nature knows better, but at the same time, while we are busy fixing things, fighting disease, are we already toying with it in a way that Natura is at the same time fighting us? Can we win? Should we?

@Gann: not so fast Gann, it could be you or a loved one who's crossing the street when that dumb or innecessary human crashes his/her car. Cuts both ways.

On the same train of thought: figthing disease where it appears it's a same level solution, secondary effects considered. On a genetic level it's prone to introduce mutating factors which might not produce deadly effects today but 2 o 3 generations down the road. Acceptable in fruit flies, but not humans. Unethical.

@MarlboroTestMonkey7: Yes, the unfortunate thing about car wrecks is that it's 50% survival of the fittest, 50% survival of the luckiest. That idiot going 90 mph after drinking a fifth of whiskey will more than likely take someone with them when they remove themselves from the gene pool.

@Gann: "...smart socially responsible people have fewer children than less intelligent socially irresponsible people..."

I have been saying this for over thirty years, although I don't think social responsibility has much to do with it. Intelligent people with a thirst for knowledge tend to be busy getting educations and having careers. They may have kids, but not as many, and the first one doesn't cause them to drop out of high school setting a pattern for the rest of their lives.

On a lighter note, there was a series of humorous short stories years ago that extrapolated this trend. People were divided into those who were smarter than we are today, and people who were far less intelligent than those in our bottom quintile are now. The smart ones ran the world, with one of their main tasks being to keep the dummies unaware of their existence, and happy in their housing developments, doing make work jobs, drinking beer, and driving cars that had recorded race car sound effects. I'm thinking Sheckley but I'm not sure.

I personally think intelligent people have a social responsibility TO procreate.

Intelligence variations at the individual level within a population's statistical range are likely not determined by genetic, but by epigenetic and environmental factors.

Those may have the effect of shifting the range of intelligence for groups subject to environmental influences (including culture), up or down depending on the character fo the influences.

The idea that the average intelligence of human populations is decreasing, while largely dependent on the definition of and measures used to determine "intelligence", is generally not supported by good evidence.

What may be the case is that the types of mental processing needed to support passing of cultural artifact from one human generation to another are becoming more prevalent and efficient, while the types needed for individually determined and motivated de novo, creative, problem solving -based on interaction with natural environments - are being selected out of the race.

Whether this has long term benefits for the survival of our selfish genes is open to question. But I suspect that the latter type of "intelligence", while submerged and increasingly recessive, will be efficiently conserved -- and so still available in the event of a "culture crash" that leaves the survival of teh gene pool dependant on the isolated individuals and small groups having little or no cultural/technological support.

@RAHfanboy: "I personally think intelligent people have a social responsibility TO procreate."
Luckily, raising intelligent children is not a numbers game. Part of what turns intelligent children into intelligent, gene-pool-influencing adults is parents who aren't spread too thin by a large family.
Plenty of organisms find biological success by choosing quality over quantity. If we can assume that these smart children are likely to mate with other smarties, the smart-kid line will continue, no matter how many children less-intelligent families have. And let's not forget the tendency of pearls to crop up among the oysters sometimes. If the have-nots didn't breed we wouldn't have any decent music to listen to.