'Embryo Bank' Stirs Ethics Fears (Clients Pick Among Fertilized Eggs)

A Texas company has started producing batches of ready-made embryos that single women and infertile couples can order after reviewing detailed information about the race, education, appearance, personality and other characteristics of the egg and sperm donors.

The Abraham Center of Life LLC of San Antonio, the first commercial dealer making embryos in advance for unspecified recipients, was created to help make it easier and more affordable for clients to have babies that match their preferences, according to its founder.

"We're just trying to help people have babies," said Jennalee Ryan, who arranged for an egg donor to start medical treatments to produce a second batch of embryos this week. "For me, that's what this is all about: helping make babies."

But the embryo brokerage, which calls itself "the world's first human embryo bank," raises alarm among some fertility experts and bioethicists, who say the service marks another disturbing step toward commercialization of human reproduction and "designer babies."

"We're increasingly treating children like commodities," said Mark A. Rothstein, a bioethicist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "It's like you're ordering a computer from Dell: You give them the specs, and they put it in the mail. I don't think we should consider mail-order computers and other products the same way we consider children."

Prospective parents have long been able to select egg or sperm donors based on ethnicity, education and other traits. Couples can also "adopt" embryos left over at fertility clinics, or have embryos created for them if they need both eggs and sperm. But the new service marks the first time anyone has started turning out embryos as off-the-shelf products.

Did you all see the movie "Gataka"? Great movie, relates to this subject, thought-provoking - go rent it.

Also, I want to know way Americans are not being allowed to see the movie Children of Men, based on PD James' novel of that name. It was released in Europe when I was there in October, and was still playing when I was there in Dec. It was supposed to have a general release here on Christmas Day. But it disappeared, and was released in only 3 US theatres that day.

Not wanting to tighten the tinfoil too much, but an interesting thing is that Tom Cruise bought a major share in United Artists a few months ago, and I would suspect that is why it has not been released here. It's anti-euthanasia and, unspokenly, anti-abortion, and Scientology is totally pro-death.

But when a purposeful, intelligent agent intervenes and alters biological development, it's not evolution; it's ---

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(Wait for it)---

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Intelligent Design. :o)

However, with more and more questions, people started to admit that they would really like their children to have more 'feline' and 'canine' qualities. People seem to get along better with their pets than each other, so these people figured that if their children were more like cats or dogs, then everyone would like them.

In the movie "A.I." - a company pioneers the development of robotic children capable of feeling and expressing true love, as an alternative for people unable to qualify for biological children under a population-control regimen. The robot children are perfect in every way - dutiful, obedient, loving children who never grow up.

In the epilogue of the film, the population-control regimen was too successful, and the robot children were too marketable, and the human race has gone extinct, leaving the descendants of the feeling robots searching for ancient clues to the nature of their human creators.

Given the demographics of reproductive rates, it seems that western civilization is headed down the same road, but without the solace of robotic heirs who care that our civilization ever existed.

A far greater possibility is the creation of several species of "homo superior", of several varieties with a multitude of variables.

This creates what could be called "Darwin's dilemma". When two similar species are in competition for a wide variety of things, the one that is distinctly superior will prevail and the other will become extinct. This holds true even in the social Darwinism of humanity. Primitive peoples just cannot coexist with modern peoples without either socially evolving or dying out.

For this reason, higher animal species intentionally destroy their own offspring that evidence superior or even significantly different characteristics from the norm. Humans, likewise, are very conscious of children born with abnormalities, and seek to "correct" them--or kill the children, in many circumstances.

But were we to intentionally make "homo superior", in the plural, that was, in fact, superior to ordinary people, we would, as a species, be in danger of dying out. Not because we were exterminated by the better ones, but just because we "gave up", not being able to compete with them and win.

Initially, we would try modifying "deficiencies" from our genetic code, doing things like eliminating hemophilia from families that suffer from the genetic disease.

Next, we would try replacing known-to-be inferior blocks of genetic code. This could be anything from congenital blindness to a high preponderance of breast cancer in females.

Then would come blocks of genetic code with less desirable traits, much more along the lines of vanity. This would be to change the features of offspring, such as appearance, height, weight, intelligence, athleticism, etc.

Intermediary to this is a tremendous problem: the genetic definition of a human being. Since humans share 96% of their genetic code with chimpanzees, for example, what do you call a being that shares 98% of its genetic code with humans? Is it a chimpanzee that looks and acts like a human, or a human that looks and acts like a chimpanzee?

People and corporations can legally patent a chimpanzee with an unusual genetic code. It has no civil rights, and can be abused and killed without legal recourse. Intelligence is far to ill-defined to use it as a discriminator, and appearance means nothing.

So once this problem has been hashed out, comes the next stage in genetic manipulation: giving people characteristics that make them superior in some way to ordinary people. These to not even have to be animal characteristics, as the DNA might be provided by plants or even bacteria.

These are your first generation "homo superior", and a distinct threat to the human species.

But that is not all. The second generation comes into existence when DNA is constructed with traits that do not exist in nature. These would be based on computer models, which would then be added to human DNA.

The end result might be so many intelligent species in theoretical competition with each other that all would be forced to specialize, to occupy different biological niches not in direct competition any more. To effectively divide the human species into several new species, each of which would have their own prerogatives.

Last but not least would be creating people with far more chromosomes than the human 23 pairs. The purpose of this would be so that they could voluntarily change their "active" genetic code, and modify themselves into a different creature, over the course of several years. That is, doing something as radical as a cat growing into a rabbit.

There are some really staggering possibilities here, and right now we can only speculate what the future holds. However, advancement in all of these directions continues, so all too soon, which doors are open to us, and which are impossible, will make themselves known.

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