Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Color ID Suspended

Thanks to the eagle-eyed Center for Genetics and Society, I just learned that the fertility company that was advertising eye-, hair-, and skin-color selection in human embryos (which I've provisionally nicknamed Color ID) has dropped the plan, at least for now. Here's the full text of the statement released Monday by the Fertility Institutes:

In response to feedback received related to our plans to introduce preimplantation genetic prediction of eye pigmentation, an internal, self regulatory decision has been made to proceed no further with this project. Though well intended, we remain sensitive to public perception and feel that any benefit the diagnostic studies may offer are far outweighed by the apparent negative societal impacts involved. For those patients with albinism or other ocular pigmentation disorders, we continue to offer preimplantation genetic diagnosis in general but will not be investigating the genetics of pigmentation of any body structures.

It's not clear how long the company's decision "to proceed no further" will last. The statement is titled "Eye and Hair Color Program Suspension."

CGS calls this a mere "postponement" and urges Congress to step in. "Like the financial industry, the fertility industry has shown that it is incapable of regulating itself," the group argues. The Fertility Institutes' announcement of a "self-regulatory decision" to suspend Color ID seems to have been crafted to head off such regulation.

What's really interesting about the statement is the reference to being "sensitive to public perception." I wonder whether that evolving factor—public opinion about aesthetic embryo selection—will determine when the suspension ends.

Brainchild Abuse

An idea passes from one person to another to another, changing shape with every transaction. No one controls the outcome. Everyone in the chain knows what the idea means to him, but no one knows how the idea will turn out.

That's the story of PGD so far. I wonder how it ends.

More here.

Dog Bites Manier

As the great houses of journalism contract and collapse, what's happening to our best science writers? Here's one answer: Jeremy Manier, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, has set up a "Science Life" blog at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

If you haven't followed Jeremy's work over the years, treat yourself to a few of his fine pieces. Here's his take on synthetic biology last year. Here's his look at empathy among chimps. And here's his wrenching story about a Christian professor's struggle to reconcile faith with evolution.

In Sunday's blog installment, Jeremy picks a small bone with yours truly. To be precise, a dog bone. Last week, I wrote about the breeding of preferred dog traits using the frozen sperm of a long-dead show poodle. I concluded: "I want to throw up."

One thing I should have learned about bioethics by now: Mention anything close to puking, and you'll remind people of Leon Kass, whose "Wisdom of Repugnance" essay has been reduced by progressives, unfairly, to shorthand for irrational conservatism. I can almost draw the chain of linked neurons for you: vomit, repugnance, Kass, George W. Bush, and back to vomit.

But my own chain of neurons has carried me away. Back to Jeremy. Here's his critique:

In this case repugnance seems more silly than wise. Dog breeders have been using frozen sperm since the 1960s. As bioethical dilemmas go, it's a Brave Old World. Saletan wants to use dog breeding as an analogy for designer babies, but it may be hopelessly flawed for that purpose because it's so familiar. Such comfortable examples are of little help in imagining how awful genetic trait selection in human babies would be.

Hmmm. Well, here's my answer, for what it's worth: I was using a familiar example because that's what we have. In projecting the future, the best we can do, empirically, is to look for a similar practice in the present or past. The existing practice will differ in some ways from what we're imagining. But the similarities may shed some light.

So here's my question to Jeremy: What current practices would be more helpful than dog breeding in projecting/imagining genetic trait selection in humans? Human trait selection is what interests both of us. As to whether canine breeding is the best way to illuminate that future—well, as the saying goes, I've got no dog in that fight.

But I do have some dogs in the fight for the blogosphere. As the old media dissolve or evolve into the new, I'm rooting for great writers like Rob Stein, John Tierney, Rick Weiss, and Carl Zimmer—from whatever perches they can find—to help weave an Internet conversation about science and technology that's as rich and engaging as the best of the Web's political commentary. Add to that list: Jeremy Manier.

Designer Dogs

When the screening starts for real, what will it look like? Would we really select babies based on such superficial criteria?

It's impossible to predict the course of such a revolution with certainty. But we know that 10 percent of couples who seek genetic counseling say they'd screen for traits such as height and athleticism if they could. And we have a loose precedent that illuminates our propensity to tinker with aesthetic traits: dog breeding.

One of my favorite writers, Amy Harmon of the New York Times, explained two years ago why we should study dog breeding before plunging into trait selection in humans:

Free of most of the ethical concerns—and practical difficulties—associated with the practice of eugenics in humans, dog breeders are seizing on new genetic research to exert dominion over the canine gene pool. Companies with names like Vetgen and Healthgene have begun offering dozens of DNA tests to tailor the way dogs look, improve their health and, perhaps soon, enhance their athletic performance. But as dog breeders apply scientific precision to their age-old art, they find that the quest for genetic perfection comes with unforeseen consequences. And with DNA tests on their way for humans, the lessons of intervening in the nature of dogs may ultimately bear as much on us as on our best friends. "We're on the verge of a real radical shift in the way we apply genetics in our society," said Mark Neff, associate director of the veterinary genetics laboratory at the University of California, Davis. "It's better to be first confronted with some of these issues when they concern our pets than when they concern us."

So dog breeding offers cautionary lessons about what trait selection does to its targets. Does it also offer cautionary lessons about what trait selection does to its perpetrators?

Three years ago, I thought so. I argued that dogs were the world's longest self-serving, ecologically reckless genetic experiment, perpetrated by the world's first genetically engineering species: us. So here we are, three years later, turning the experiment on ourselves. What does dog breeding tell us about the culture of aesthetic eugenics?

As it happens, we got a good look at that culture last week, when the Westminster Kennel Club held its annual dog show. The Times' Katie Thomas used the occasion to examine the increasingly efficient practice of breeding dogs from frozen semen. "In 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, frozen semen was used to conceive 760 litters of [American Kennel Club]-approved puppies," she reported. Among other things, "[f]rozen semen has been used for decades by breeders who want to inject a dash of nostalgia into a litter of puppies." The owner of a canine semen bank explained, "One of the reasons people like to use frozen semen is to be able to dip back into a gene pool for a more classic look."

That's what the breeder of one of this year's winners at the dog show did: He made the dog using 25-year-old frozen sperm from a previous champion named Snapper. The breeder "said he had long lamented the decline of pizazz in modern-day poodles, the trademark ‘poodly temperament' that gives them such stage presence in the ring," Thomas reported. "He wondered if Snapper's genes would do the trick and create an exciting show dog."

The good news: The Frankenstein experiment worked. The poodle brought its long-dead sire's "sashay," "balance," and "fluid movement" back to life. It won the show.

The bad news: I want to throw up.

That's what aesthetic trait selection in humans will do to us. It will make our bodies prettier—and our souls uglier.

Screening Embryos With Color ID

Is the era of designer babies finally upon us?

Every week, it seems, we're told that this discovery or that technology might lead to "designer babies." I've heard this so many times that I've stopped taking it seriously. Genetic engineering always turns out to be more complicated than expected, and our latest technology always turns out to be less capable than advertised.

But now trait selection seems to be coming into view for real.

More here.

Little Green Men

The genetically engineered humans are here! The genetically engineered humans are here!

I didn't believe it when I heard the report was in the Sunday Times of London. This, after all, is the paper that butchered the gay sheep story and can't find any evidence to back up its disputed paraphrases of James Watson. But the original report, which the Sunday Times neglects to mention, turns out to have been published in a scientific journal, Fertility and Sterility. It's titled, "Genetic modification of preimplantation embryos and embryonic stem cells (ESC) by recombinant lentiviral vectors: efficient and stable method for creating transgenic embryos and ESC."

For those of you who don't have access to the pricey journal, the New York Times boils down the experiment: Scientists "put a gene for a fluorescent protein into the single-celled human embryo," and "after the embryo divided for three days, all the cells in the embryo glowed."

What's new in this experiment isn't genetic modification of humans. We've already done that in limited doses, through the same viral technique. What's new is that because this was a single-celled embryo, every cell it went on to produce, including egg and sperm cells, would (except for the diploid-haploid transition, which gets complicated) carry the same genetic tweak. If the embryo were implanted and grew into an adult, its fluorescent gene would be passed down like any other. This is called germline modification. If you wanted to transform our species or give your offspring an advantage that persists through generations, this is how you'd do it.

Naturally, genetic watchdog groups are freaked out. Human Genetics Alert calls it a prelude to "eugenics" and "designer babies" and demands an "international moratorium on such experiments." The Center for Genetics and Society says it "could push us toward a GATTACA-like world" dominated by "the genetically enhanced."

The scientists, based at Cornell University, offer several responses. First, they used no U.S. federal funds, so no legal restrictions were violated. Second, the gene conveyed no enhancements; it was just a green "marker" to help them see whether it was replicated in subsequent cell divisions. Third, the experiment "was done on an embryo that was never going to be viable," due to pre-existing chromosomal defects. Fourth, they destroyed the embryo after five days, as required by a Cornell review committee.

The watchdog groups are alarmed because Britain's parliament is presently debating legislation to lift restrictions on human embryonic genetic modification. (See yesterday's post about the bill's pregnant-man loophole.) But proponents of the legislation point out that the law would still ban growing such embryos beyond 14 days or transferring them to a womb.

When you line up the points made by scientists and liberalizers, it's easier to understand what's really going on here. It's not that we're plowing unimpeded toward genetic engineering of children. To the contrary, we've drawn lines to prevent that: the 14-day limit and the no-implantation rule. What's going on is that by drawing these lines, we've created a zone where virtually no legal or moral rules apply. Look at the American and British treatment of cloning, and you'll see the same pattern. You can clone embryos, mix species, and engineer all you want, as long as you don't implant the embryos or grow them beyond 14 days.

Maybe this system will allow us to make important scientific discoveries and conquer diseases without crossing the lines we've drawn. On the other hand, maybe it'll turn embryos into a testing ground for techniques that we'll use for people-engineering when we're ready to go there. Or maybe we'll relax the rules a bit at a time, extending our techniques to more advanced embryos as we test and refine them. We'll tell ourselves that we're curing genetic diseases in the womb so that babies and their babies will be born healthy.

The argument for the latter scenario is that, far from being diabolical, the idea of loosening the 14-day rule makes a lot of sense. The Cornell scientists point out that genetically modified embryos "could be used to study how diseases develop" and that "in order to be sure that the new gene had been inserted and the embryo had been genetically modified, scientists would ideally need to grow the embryo and carry out further tests." The longer you grow the embryo, the more you learn.

How long could we grow genetically modified embryos if we lift the 14-day rule? According to the New York Times, "A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said the Cornell work would not be classified as gene therapy in need of federal review, because a test-tube embryo is not considered a person under the regulations." Roughly speaking, U.S. law confers personhood at viability. That's five months or so. Plenty of time for good work to be done.

I don't mean to make this scenario sound imminent. But as we ease ourselves into the world of genetic engineering, let's notice what we're doing. We're chalking off a zone where the ethics of human manipulation don't apply, on the grounds that the human entities we're manipulating aren't human beings. Seven years ago, scientists and supportive ethicists set up a similar ethics-free zone based on origin: Human embryos produced by fertilization were protected, while those produced by cloning were fair game. Now we've shifted to lines based on age and location.

Will these lines hold? You can't dismiss the fear that they won't as slippery-slope nonsense from the anti-abortion crowd. Embryo research is fundamentally different from abortion. If you're a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, you have no incentive to prolong it. But if you're a scientist with an embryo modified for research, you have lots of good reasons to keep growing it and studying it. The only things holding you back are your conscience, your review board, and the law.

Here's my prediction: We won't end up extending species-mixing beyond the 14-day line. Nor will we end up deliberately growing embryos past that point for harvestable tissue, as I previously speculated. But we will extend germline genetic engineering all the way through pregnancy and beyond, and our grandchildren will wonder why it was ever controversial.