"Racial alchemy" - for real?

On the heels of the explosive and fascinating saga of the IVF octuplets, Los Angeles has produced another controversial development in assisted reproductive technologies. And it is adding more fuel to the fire of calls for oversight.

Discussions of embryo screening  have often included references to, "What's next  -  eye and skin color?" Until now, such hypothesizing seemed distant. But the Wall Street Journal recently reported on advertisements from the Fertility Institutes of L.A., which tell parents that they will soon be able to select their future child’s "gender, eye color, hair color, and more."

What’s particularly striking is that the "more" referenced by the Fertility Institutes, led by Jeffrey Steinberg, includes selecting "complexion." While the Journal article notes that this is not presently available for "other ethnicities such as Asians or Africans because key pigmentation markers for those groups haven't yet been identified," the writing is on wall. In fact, such research is actively ongoing.

While I generally avoid the phrase, this is clearly another step down the proverbial slippery slope. PGD can be a critical tool in avoiding  the births of children with  serious disease, but these new applications are about breeding babies that suit aesthetic preferences based upon social prejudices. My colleague Osagie Obasogie brought up these points in a 2007 article in the New Scientist, "Racial Alchemy." And another fellow BP blogger, Marcy Darnovsky, captured the hazards well in the WSJ article: "If we're going to produce children who are claimed to be superior because of their particular genes, we risk introducing new sources of discrimination."

One of the prospective parents in an early use of PGD wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed put it differently: "Abusing that hard-won knowledge to capriciously choose hair color, eye color and other cosmetic traits in a baby is wrong and repugnant."

Profiting from social prejudice is not new. Here's an ad from India for a skin lightening cream: