Yuppie Eugenics

The explosive proliferation of preconceptive and prenatal tests has provided more and more reasons to terminate pregnancies in the hope of a better roll of the dice. Given certain features of modern prosperous societies, there is an increasing tendency to exercise such options on the basis of notions of biological perfectibility. This tendency is transforming Choice Eugenics into Yuppie Eugenics. What was once a preventative choice has become a pro-active entitlement, exacerbated by the sense prevailing among current elites that one has the right to control all aspects of one's life and shape them by buying and periodically upgrading the best that technology has to offer, be it a computer, a car, or a child. Because this trend enjoys broadly based, mainstream sanction in the United States, what may begin as elite yuppie-ism is poised to become more widely disseminated as the technologies become cheaper and their use becomes more routine.

Fair-minded people differ on the point at which Choice Eugenics grades into Yuppie Eugenics. For some people with congenital disabilities, much Choice Eugenics, directed to preventing the birth of people like themselves, is going too far. People with congenital disabilities typically feel whole, and consider themselves victimized not by their genes, but by disaccomodating social arrangements. At the same time, a lack of extended family and health support systems can, for many, shift the balance against "preventable diversity." All eugenics defines some people as biologically unacceptable. Each turn of the screw en route to Yuppie Eugenics potentially excludes more and more people.

The false hope that scientists can alter an embryo genetically so as to "enhance" its potential and to make it conform to the future parents' image of a desirable child is also part of Yuppie Eugenics. Such unrealistic expectations, built on intrinsically unreliable genetic foreknowledge as well as on unscientific notions of the correspondence of specific genes to complex traits, can tempt prospective parents to agree to novel biological manipulations that are at least as likely to introduce problems as to remedy them. Also called germ-line genetic engineering or germ-line "gene therapy," this possibility has aroused widespread opposition. There are religious, but also secular philosophical reasons for resisting a technology that plays into the idea of the developing human as a perfectible item. The goal of perfection encourages a view of existing life as imperfect. It transforms life into an ahistorical object, without context and eventually artifactual.

Objections also center on the fact that a genetic alteration introduced into an embryo is likely to become a permanent part of the genetic endowment of the person into whom that embryo develops and thus also of all of her or his progeny. Considering that the procedures themselves are experimental and the results are unpredictable (laboratory mice on which such procedures are performed often produce progeny with malformations, behavioral abnormalities, or increased cancer rates), germ-line genetic engineering poses unacceptable risks for "persons" who have just barely been conceived. There is no justification for undertaking such manipulations. If the prospective parents of the child into whom the embryo would develop are concerned that it may not meet their expectations, they need not gestate it.

Unfortunately this insidious prospect of germline engineering has found advocates among scientists such as James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and the first director of the Human Genome Project, and Princeton University biologist Lee Silver. In his book Remaking Eden and in numerous appearances on television and the college speaking circuit, Silver has been trying to persuade the public to get used to the prospect of a world with genetic haves and have nots that would eventually lead to separate, and intentionally unequal, human species.

Fortunately, other more responsible scientists, writers, and activists have warned about the ominous safety and social implications of following this path, and have called for a ban on producing genetically-engineered humans. Indeed many European countries already prohibit such procedures.

This makes it particularly discreditable that the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest professional organization of scientists in the United States, has gone on record with a statement that dances around the hazards of germline modification without even raising the possibility of a ban. Although the panel that prepared the AAAS report considers that the time is not yet ripe for implementing inheritable genetic modifications (IGM), it leaves the door open for future uses: "Although there are major technical obstacles to developing human IGM in the responsible ways that we have recommended," they write, "it is possible that at some time in the future scientific advances will make it feasible to undertake IGM." The AAAS panel failed to explain that only an unethical line of research, in contravention of the internationally endorsed Nuremburg Code on human experimentation, would have to be undertaken before any assurances can be made as to the risks of these procedures.

Cloning, another experimental genetic technology touted as a new "reproductive option," is being advocated by maverick physicians and scientists despite wide evidence of pathology in animals produced in this fashion. Some of these proponents, including a representative of the Raelians, a Canadian religious cult that claims to have received an extraterrestrial directive to clone its adherents, were given a respectful hearing at a forum at the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in August 2001.

Yuppie Eugenics also has its boosters among journalists and professional bio- ethicists. Michael Kinsley, writing in Slate (April 2000), suggested that genetic tests should eventually be used as qualifications for employment. He was seconded by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine (July 2000), where he argued that genetic testing for future capacities is less objectionable than using SAT scores or letters of recommendation, since genetic tests are "more reliable." Arthur Caplan, Glenn McGee, and David Magnus of the University of Pennsylvania Institue of Bioethics follow the Kinsley-Sullivan thesis to its logical conclusion when they state, in a 1999 British Medical Journal article, "it is not clear that it is any less ethical to allow parents to pick the eye color of their child or to try to create a fetus with a propensity for mathematics than it is to permit them to teach their children the values of a particular religion or require them to play the piano." Here the intersubjective nature of the parent-child relationship is conflated with the one-way imposition of a chancy, irreversible genetic alteration during the earliest stages of embryonic development.

What is generally ignored in such prescriptions is that each gene contributes to numerous traits, and that any trait of significance depends on the functions of many different genes. Genes and other features involved in growth and development constitute integral wholes that genetic alterations are more likely to disturb than enhance.

Yuppie Eugenics builds on the mirage that applications of genetics and biotechnology will be able to make us more perfect as well as to counter all forms of pain, illness, and death. The best way to restore us to sanity is to remember that genetics will never tell us what it takes to make a worthy human being and that the major causes of human illness and death continue to be not enough healthful food and too much unhealthful work. Eugenic and other gene dreams will not cure what ails us.