And, accordingly, a good one. Incidentally, I don't see the word "hinky" all that much. For a while, I thought my mother had invented it.

Anyway, it doesn't bother me in the least that rich families could afford this screening process. The rich have access to better health care and they always have. Hell, comparatively, the U.S. can afford much better health care than Namibia, but no one's saying Americans should give up prostate exams. So the only question is the ethics of screening for certain genetic traits. And my gut feeling is most parents will screen for disease and nothing else. I for one just want a healthy child, and right now - who knows, I guess, what would happen if I were presented with the actual choice - I can only see myself wanting to avoid degenerative disorders and childhood killers and the like. Not hazel eyes or a slow time in the 40-yard dash.

Saying, "If I could prevent my daughter from getting cancer, I'd do it" is misleading. What they're really doing is selecting embryos based on the probability of a given embryo developing cancer as an adult.

Would we be as comfortable with the more accurate statement, "I would not want a daughter who would get breast cancer. I would throw those embryos away and choose one that would be less likely to get breast cancer."

And, of course, the right-to-life bunch would say it even more starkly: "I would not want a daughter who would get breast cancer. I would kill any child that might get cancer later in life."

The movie Gattaca explores this issue fairly well for a Hollywood movie, by the way.

Since only approximately 10-15% of Breast Cancer cases are acutally "caused" by genes, a purely genetic susceptibility is only one factor in whether or not a woman develops breast cancer over her lifetime. The vast majority of Breast Cancer "victims" did not have genetic risk factor or the BRCA gene factors (myself included). It's a mistake to think that you can weed out all risk of cancer later in life at the embryo stage. Many cancers are enviornmental, caused by our bodies accumulating and developing genetic mutations that can eventually lead to cancer based on the many things that we are exposed to outside the womb.

Perhaps, a woman could select an embryo that doesn't have a "breast cancer" genetic vulnerability, but years later her child could come down with lung cancer, skin cancer, bladder cancer, or leukemia.

As a breast cancer survivor, I can also find this debate a little offensive. Getting breast cancer wasn't fun and the experience was a tough ordeal, but you get over it. You move on. That's the good news today. Many women who get breast cancer today go on to live (Thank God!) for years afterwards and they live happy productive lives. Many of us even feel that our experience with cancer changed us in a positive way. It's ridiculous to assume that just because someone had an illness that we would have been better off never having been born. I love my life, and gettting breast cancer was just one a part of a life I wouldn't trade for anything.

So the wealthy get to have cancer-free offspring while the poorer continue to take their chances?

I see this sort of argument a lot in this blog, and it really doesn't make any sense at all to me.

New things are expensive. Early adopters pay more. This is true for electric cars, medical technology, and mp3 players. It's true that the rich get to have them and nobody else does, but only in the beginning.

Early adopters drive technology development. If nobody buys something, then it doesn't continue to get funded, and dies before it gets cheap. If the early adopters do like something, then the kinks get worked out, other companies start doing it, and innovation and competition drive down the price. Future consumers pay less for a better product.

This is just as true for new medical procedures as it is for anything else. Consider Lasic eye surgery, just as an example. It has been around for about 10 years, and in that time it has become significantly safer and the price has dropped by 75%. It's not covered by insurance, and purely optional, so it seems like a good analogy to in vitro cancer screening in that way.

If you argue against new medical procedures on the basis that only rich people get them, then not only will the rich people not get them (which doesn't seem to me to increase the happiness in the world, rather the opposite), it means that nobody will. And now you're denying not just current rich people but future middle class people.

Please rethink your common "only for rich people" argument, at least when it comes to technology.

Frankly, I'm for an ethical approach to eugenics, which would be entirely voluntary at a minimum. With the knowledge that genetic manipulation in humans is possible, even pragmatic, we've opened a new technological frontier with it's own accompanying manifest destiny. It's not a matter of whether or not we'll get around to practicing eugenics on the genetic level, it's when and how.

If we're going to allow eugenics as a society, we need to decide on some terms we can agree to. For instance, eugenics combined with our currently rigid class mobility leads to a Gattaca style society very quickly. Before we can launch full-scale into eugenics, we need to take measures to be certain eugenics won't become a tool serving a rigid class structure. Secondly, steps must be taken to preserve free will and autonomous choice in use of eugenics. In other words, parents cannot be compelled to use or not use eugenics procedures, they can't be bred, they can't be sterilized or have their pregnancies terminated without their consent and so on. Laws will have to be enacted forbidding insurance companies from requiring genetics screens on the unborn and further forbidding them from refusing to cover children found to have genetic conditions. We will have to decide if genetic conditions count as a pre-existing condition or not. Personally, I see the emergence of a genetic age as an argument for socialized medicine, to ensure everyone regardless of genetic condition, is fairly treated. Likewise, rights to freedom from eugenics meddling while ensuring equal access to voluntary eugenics measures must be enshrined in our legal system. Under no circumstances can governments be given the power to dictate traits to parents or it will eventually result in the unhealthy genetic specialization of humans. As a wise man once said: specialization is for insects. (And not a great way to cope with natural disasters.) That nurture strongly influences an individual's capabilities must be acknowledged in law, mandating that individuals be reviewed for jobs purely on their demonstrated qualifications.

Here and there, things will slip, but our most important tool for coping with eugenics is instinctual: humanity seeks variety. Even as groups try to conform, women have an instinctual urge to mate with "outsiders" or "foreigners." Furthermore, parents have a strong drive to have children "of their own," including the shared DNA, so like previous posters they're ultimately unlikely to want a blond haired blue eyed child if they themselves aren't. After all, we've been practicing eugenics through natural selection since we emerged from the treetops. By resisting authoritarian pressures to conform, we can weather the social changes this will inflict. Here's hoping we'll be able to make the technologies ubiquitous, available to rich and poor alike. Even without government interference in individual choice, it's in the government's best interest to make the technology available to all.