One scientist thinks that we’ll stop having sex to make babies within 30 years.
The
romantically named ‘procreative sex’ will be a thing of the past for
humans, because technology will have developed far enough that designer
babies will become the norm.
Rather
than lighting a few candles and sticking a Marvin Gaye song on,
prospective parents will head to a lab and provide the raw materials
(sperm, skin cells) and scientists will put an ideal embryo together for
them, rather than risking an imperfect offspring via traditional
methods.
In
a paper titled “The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction”,
medical and law expert Henry T. Greely posits that it will a legally
regulated service that will be low cost enough that everyone - not just
the moneyed upper classes - can take advantage.
“Within
twenty, maybe forty, years most people in developed countries will stop
having sex for the purpose of reproduction,” the summary states.
“Instead,
prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the
genetic makeup of dozens of embryos, and they will pick one or two for
implantation, gestation, and birth. And it will be safe, lawful, and
free.”
Parents will be told how attractive, clever and healthy each resulting embryo is likely to be.
“We won’t be able to say: ‘this child is in the top 1% of intelligence,’” Greely told the Sunday Times. “We will probably be able to to say: 'this child has a 60% chance of being in the top half.’”
Described
as “prophetic scholarship”, the paper suggests that certain hereditary
diseases could be stamped out by the new method, as a handy side effect
of a new super race of irritatingly perfect children that will
consistently make the older generations feel terrible.
Meanwhile, people will probably keep having sex for fun. So don’t worry about that.
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