Atlas Sports Genetics, a testing company in Boulder, Colorado, analyzes children’s ACTN3 gene, which has been linked with athletic performance. Certain variants of the gene supposedly indicate whether an individual is predisposed to excelling at certain sports based on the involvement of speed, power, and endurance in each sport. Atlas advertises its wares by suggesting to their parents that their child could be a future Olympic champion, and claiming that their test could identify that championship ability in weeks rather than potentially wasteful years years.

Currently, the predictive abilities of these tests are dubious. But even if these and other genetic tests become accurate predictors of ability, there is a lot of doubt as to whether children should be assigned any sort of ability orientation. Some note that the tests are less for the benefit of children than for parents with Olympic and All-American dreams:

“I find it worrisome because I don’t think parents will be very clear-minded about this,” said William Morgan, an expert on the philosophy of ethics and sport and author of “Why Sports Morally Matter.” “This just contributes to the madness about sports because there are some parents who will just go nuts over the results.

“The problem here is that the kids are not old enough to make rational autonomous decisions about their own life,” he said. (NYT “Born to Run? Little Ones Get Test for Sports Gene”)

William Salaten at Slate’s Human Nature blog sees something more insidious at work, noting that this test could result in our culture performing a kind of environmental eugenics, creating a Gattaca-like future where children are barred from certain activities:

What's really disturbing about this idea, in the case of ACNT3, is that it isn't crazy. The data make a strong case that being XX really does lock you out of success at the highest levels of sprinting and power sports. From an individual standpoint, that doesn't much matter: You can run track, play pickup basketball, and live happily ever after. But from your country's standpoint, putting you on the track team is a waste. We need that slot for an RR kid, and we need a genetic test to find him.

And, notes Lisa Belkin at the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, putting a child in only activities in which they succeed can actually be counterproductive to a child’s development into a full-fledged person:

What I fear it would become is one more way for parents to insure that their children never learn to fail. In her latest book, “Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking: Powerful, Practical Strategies to Build a Lifetime of Resilience, Flexibility and Happiness,” the psychologist Tamar Chansky argues that this is one of the most fundamental jobs of a parent, and one we don’t tend to do very well…If you never fail, she writes, you never learn that you can pick yourself back up again. And that’s a lesson best learned young, while your center of gravity is low and it doesn’t hurt as much to fall down.

It seems that in all this, the core problem is that parents are purchasing tests like these for their children, who are too young to exert autonomy over their situations and too easily seen as a collection of genes rather than the humans they will evolve into. Perhaps the problems of eugenics and pigeonholing could be alleviated by performing non-medical consumer genetic testing only on people who are able to consent to it.

[Atlas Sports Genetics via New York Times]

Many people, including the infamous bio-ethicist Peter Singer, would argue that there's a social benefit to knowing whether you're going to have a Down's Syndrome baby. The child will need lifelong care and supervision, which could be a drain on family (and the state). Presumably, having that information early in a pregnancy will allow the parents the option to terminate it and try for a child who will grow up to live autonomously. And indeed, researchers report in this week's British Medical Journal that the testing has clearly had this effect in Denmark, where the number of babies born with Down's Syndrome went down from 55 in 2000, to 31 in 2005, after the testing program was in place.

The Denmark program's main innovation was early, non-invasive testing for Down's Syndrome. If a pregnancy showed several symptoms of producing a Down's baby, the doctors would suggest a more invasive test that could determine beyond a doubt whether the baby would be born with the condition. Previously, the only tests available had been the invasive one and as a result fewer women opted to take the test. Even today, all Down's pre-natal testing in Denmark is opt-in for parents.

Let's say the idea of terminating a Down's pregnancy doesn't disturb you. But what about babies who will be born with holes in their hearts, a potential for cancer, or possible schizophrenia? Where does eugenics become genetic fascism? Given that this kind of pre-natal screening is aimed at helping parents make an informed decision about whether to terminate, what conditions should parents be allowed to screen for?

Impact of a New National Screening Policy for Down's Syndrome in Denmark [via British Medical Journal]

Fact: There isn't any language in the bill covering government action to discriminate against its citizens. There are still people in this country calling for racial segregation and some of them, like Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott were in Congress until 2003! Who's to say a new breed of DNA-based eugenics supporters haven't already begun inflitrating the government?

"But the bill's been passed," you say. "Show me even ONE of these gene-racists you speak of!"

A fair challenge...

Exhibit A: Tom Coburn, Senator from Oklahoma. Last fall both the House of Representatives and Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass GINA into law but Coburn mysteriously stymied them all, blocking the bill for eight months. He claims it was to revise the bill to make it harder for people to sue companies for discrimination, but he is a medical doctor. As a doctor he should have been 100% behind the bill, so why the opposition? We may never know until it's too late...

*This is of course, tongue-in-cheek...GINA's a great bill that should be applauded, even if it does mean we'll never get to play the role of genetically-imperfect heroes in a dystopian future.

Source: Genetics and Public Policy Center, Image: Cinezik.org

The Eugenics Movement
The most famous example of eugenics in action is Adolf Hitler's forced breeding program, in which SS officers systematically impregnated women deemed to be appropriately Aryan. The children, bred in a program called Lebensborn, were supposed to be the beginning of a new master race. Hitler's evolutionary intervention also involved genocides of "undesirables," because while you're building a new race, why not get rid of the supposedly undesirable ones too? The Eugenics movement didn't start with Hitler, though. It had a long, rich history that began in the nineteenth century and was very popular in the United States. Early twentieth-century country fairs in the U.S. often featured eugenics contests at country fairs, with awards going to the most "genetically sound" white families. Below, you can see a group of girls from a 4H club who won in a genetic fitness contest circa 1925. Nicolae Ceausescu's Decree No. 770
In the late 1960s, Romanian dictator Ceausescu decided that the population of his country needed to grow much larger to provide strapping workers for industrial labor. First he tried to reward women who had several babies, but that program didn't work quickly enough. So in 1966, he outlawed abortion. Women were forbidden from using contraception, and underwent fertility checks at work. In 1967, the birth rate in the country doubled. The children born that year were called Decreteii, or children of the decree. Many suffered or died young because they were unwanted or had been born under adverse circumstances.

Chinese 1 Child Per Couple Policy
To cut back on its population, the Chinese government in the early 1980s mandated that each couple may have only one child or suffer penalties. There have been widespread reports of couples choosing to abort or abandon girl children. In some areas of the country, this breeding program has turned homo sapiens into a species whose male population exceeds its female population by 163.5 to 100. Apparently the UN recommends a "normal" ratio is no more than 107 to 100. Clonaid
Clonaid is a company that purports to be engaging in human cloning, specifically to change the human species. They were embroiled in scandal when it was revealed that many Clonaid "scientists" were members of the Raelian cult (or religion, depending on how you feel about it) that believed humans were descended from cloned aliens. Scientists from Clonaid claim to have cloned a human, though they offer no concrete proof. So far, they have had zero impact on human evolution, but get points for trying to achieve evolutionary intervention via publicity.

Fertility Treatments and IVF
Two years ago, 3 million babies had been born world-wide thanks to IVF and other fertility treatments. In a scenario of pure, wild Darwinian sexual selection, none of those babies would have been born. Those 3 million plus babies represent a dramatic shift in human evolution that we are only beginning to understand.

It turns out that the "Rope" the Rollerboy leader keeps referring to is actually a chemical designed to sterilize the non-white people who use the Mist, the drug the gang peddles. It's a eugenics experiment and a profit center. Pretty sweet deal. And the Rollerboys do throw an awesome party, with tons of balloons, a cute mermaid wearing body paint, and some lube-wrestling. Don't you forget about them.

Lensmen begins two billion years in the past, when a race of noble philosophers, the Arisians, have developed awesome mental powers. Invaders from another universe, the Eddorians, come to our universe because they detect that our galaxy is passing through another one. This galactic do-si-do will lead to the creation of countless new inhabited worlds for the Eddorians to conquer.

So the Arisians breed a new super-race of humans to defend the galaxy. And they give the Lens, which focuses thought the way a lens focuses light, to our heroes. (It's sort of like the Guardians giving a super ring to Green Lantern.) Only the Lens' proper owner can wear it without dying. The Arisians only give Lenses to worthy individuals, and if you try to get a Lens but aren't worthy, you just disappear.

In the end, the heroic Kimball Kinnison marries the ultimate product of the Arisians' billion-year breeding program, Clarissa MacDougall. She's the first female to receive the coveted Lens. Their genetically perfect offspring have amazing powers and become the Children of the Lens.

Not only is Lensmen the sort of sprawling saga that does badly in the movies (not unlike Dune), but its themes of eugenics and oddball sexism are obviously a product of the 1930s, when the series began. Can Howard and Universal make a non-sucky version? Probably only by changing it beyond recognition. Luckily, there's some precedent: fans complain that the anime version of Lensmen has nothing in common with the novels except the title and a few character names. Image from cover of Second Stage Lensmen. [SciFi Wire]