Frankenbabies

Genetic science is progressing by leaps and bounds.  Crazed scientists are sequencing genomes and splicing genes and cloning right and left.  Congresspeople who failed high school biology and voters who never heard of it are passing laws regulating "stem cell research."  We're on the verge of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," but the thing that seems to scare the common person most is the possibility that "genetically modified corn" may be lurking somewhere in the freezercase at the grocery store.

Disaster is lurking in a lot of different directions:  Laboratories are incubating all sorts of deadly viruses, some only a couple of mutations away from being virulent and deadly enough to wipe out the whole of humanity if and when they are released.  Farm animals are being pumped full of antibiotics so that they can stay alive under atrocious factory farm conditions for long enough to be slaughterable, giving the "bugs" a chance to acquire immunity to those self-same antibiotics in time to keep the antibiotics from saving you the next time you've got an infection.  But if you really want to try to anticipate trouble, I'd suggest  you focus on humanity's inherent silliness and vanity.

Right now, it's becoming popular to breed fluorescent fish and clone dead pets (sounds like "Pet Sematary," only without the ancient Indian burial ground, to me.)  But it won't be long until we get down to the real meat of the matter and start concentrating on the serious business of making people look "better," and eventually act "better," too.  Now there you'll start getting into some interesting situations.

Of course, not every dad will want his kid to be an NBA star-- some will opt for football or baseball, instead.  And if and when it becomes both technically possible and marginally affordable for moms and dads to tinker on a cellular level to customize their kids I'm sure that you'll you see a lot of celebrity lookalikes and superheroes and Barbie dolls walking around, too. 

Because human beings seem to have a strong herd instinct, the longterm trend will probably be toward "standardization" of appearance.  But then again, people want to be distinctive, too, and therefore there will be a countervailing trend toward "customization."  And the genetics companies will be happy to oblige, offering "upgrades" to the basic "Hunk" and "Hottie" models for an additional fee.  Pretty soon kids will be like cars or cellphones or televisions: everyone has a "luxury" car and a "smartphone," and a flatscreen HD TV, it's just that some are more expensive... and better all around... than others.

No matter how much money some people have, it won't be enough to buy them good sense or good taste.  And that will hold true with kid-designing, too.  Just check out some of the plastic surgery abominations pictured in the tabloids on sale at your local supermarket if you want to know how warped people's vision of "beauty" can get.  Just think collagen lips, permanent makeup, facelifts after which one's ears wind up on top of one's head.  Your imagination isn't going to be good enough to prepare you for what's coming, at least not without a fistful of those mythical LSD-laced potato chips you may remember from your college days.

And suppose people had the power to insure that their kids had IQ's that were twenty... or fifty... or a hundred points higher than Mom and Dad's.  How's that going to turn out, leaving aside for the moment the indisputable fact that kids already think their parents are morons?  Imagine the resentment of a generation of real, not just imagined, geniuses raised by a generation of dolts.  "Logan's Run" time, for sure, for anyone over 30 in a world like that.

Let's be honest with ourselves, just this once.  Mary Shelley proved definitively, with her chilling tale of "Frankenstein," that human beings are too stupid and short-sighted to design a superman.  Aldous Huxley and Hitler gave us something to think about in this regard, too.  Just this once, couldn't we hearken to the wise words uttered by Jeff Goldblum in "Jurassic Park," when as Dr. Ian Malcolm he castigated the idiots who decided to clone dinosaurs by observing, "You were so busy trying to see if you could, you never stopped to ask whether you should," or something approximately like that and at least equally terse and profound.

With all the new "fertility science" and egg-freezing and sperm donating and zygote-growing-in-a-Petrie-dish going on, people have it in their heads that anyone can be a parent, whether that's what Nature wants or not.  That's bad enough, all by itself.  But if we start tinkering at the cellular level with the goal of achieving the dream of creating the "perfect child" for everyone, we'll deserve whatever cataclysm awaits.  Ever hear of Pandora's Box?