Perfecting or selecting? When ‘kinds of children’ are the objective

ABSTRACT

With news of the birth of the world’s first babies following embryo gene editing breaking in November 2018, transhumanist aspirations to biotechnologically augment human capacities seem that much closer to reality. In this commentary, I argue that recent and ongoing biotechnological developments in reproductive and genetic science notwithstanding, we will do well to self-administer sharp doses of humility if we are pitting human ingenuity against the complexities of the human genome and gene regulation. Selective reproduction today remains almost entirely a matter of ‘selecting out’, ‘discarding’ and ‘terminating’ rather than of ‘designing’ or ‘perfecting’.

KEYWORDS:

• Selective reproduction
• gene editing
• eugenics
• gametogenesis
• prenatal testing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayo Wahlberg

Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Working broadly within the field of social studies of (bio)medicine, his research has focused on traditional herbal medicine (in Vietnam and the United Kingdom), reproductive and genetic technologies (in China and Denmark) as well as health metrics (in clinical trials and global health). In his current project “The Vitality of Disease – Quality of Life in the Making“, funded by the European Research Council (2015–2021), a team of ethnographers are exploring how chronic living forms the everyday lives of millions of people who live with (chronic) conditions throughout the world. He is the author of Good Quality – the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (University of California Press), co-editor of Southern Medicine for Southern People – Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and editor at the interdisciplinary journal BioSocieties (Palgrave Macmillan).