Writing in the Yale Daily News Divya Subrahmanyam points to high dollar offers for ideal egg donors.
“Ivy League Egg Donor Wanted.”
Sound familiar? From the News to the New Haven Register, this and similar ads for egg donors have appeared in the pages of local newspapers, attempting to lure intelligent Yale women with sums ranging from $5,000 to $100,000.
One Web site, offering $35,000 is looking for a “Genius Asian donor,” and describes the ideal match: “You should have or be working on a university degree from a world-class university, you should have high standardized test scores, and preferably have some outstanding achievements and awards.”
Another, EliteDonors.com seeks a donor who is Caucasian, “very attractive,” “height 5’9” or taller” and “athletic.” The ad claims to offer $100,000 as minimum compensation.
That $100,000 seems like a large sum of money for human eggs today. But suppose that choosing the right egg results in a smarter child with a responsible, calm, and motivated disposition. The boost in life time income could be many times that initial $100,000 investment.
The value from choosing "premium" eggs will soar as plummeting costs of DNA sequencing technologies bring about an explosion of discoveries about genetic variations for controlling intelligence and personality. The ability to choose between eggs based on detailed genetic profile of donors will greatly increase the probability of getting some desired genetic outcome.
The initial genetic screening of potential donors still doesn't control for the randomness of which portion of a person's DNA went into each egg. But that will become a solvable problem. Fertilization of multiple eggs and genetic testing of each embryo is already possible today. Once we know what thousands of genetic variations do to determine IQ, personality, physical attractiveness, and many other attributes screening of multiple embryos will become very desirable. At that point expect to see skyrocketing prices for donor eggs with the most desired attributes.
An Israeli Jewish doctor successfully started a pregnancy in an Arab girl at the age of 16.
The total fertility rate in Israel is currently estimated at 2.77 children born per woman, one of the highest rates in the world. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a gynaecologist at Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center in Jerusalem, recently led a team of doctors that successfully performed in vitro fertilization (IVF) on a 16-year-old girl. The patient, AH, had had extensive medical and surgical fertility treatment since the age of 14. Haimov-Kochman tells Ewen Callaway why she helped a teenager get pregnant – and why other Arab teens are likely to follow.
The Israelis are losing a demographic battle of the womb to the much more fertile Arabs.
This fertility doctor sees respecting the mentality and cultural norms of another group as important drivers in her decision. Personally, I'm not suicidal. Quite the opposite in fact. But I respect the cultural norms that cause this doctor to behave suicidally for her culture (though I'd lose all that respect if my own culture was threatened). On second thought, introspecting I see that I do not feel that respect. Indifference is more like it. Not my country. Not my culture.
So what contributed to your team's eventual decision to treat AH?
Treatment of AH was based on the couple's decision to start therapy. Respecting the patient's mentality and cultural norms, the patient's right for therapy, and its wide availability in Israel all contributed to our decision to treat the patient.
It is understandable that in a society with an exceedingly high fertility rate, where the major role of the female spouse is to bear and rear children, strong peer and family pressure is imposed on infertile patients – especially the young and less educated ones.
What do you all think? Do 14 year old Muslim girls in Jerusalem have a right to begin fertility treatment?
More basically, is there a basic right to reproduction? If so, why? Does it not matter what the consequences are?
Outsourcing takes so many forms. Foreigners rent wombs in India in order to save money.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).
I'm sure you all can see the next logical step: parenting surrogacy. Hire the surrogate mother to keep taking care of the kid even after birth. Get to claim the kid is yours without having to interrupt your drive to success by actually taking the time to raise it. You could fly into India (or have the baby flown to your home country) once a year to get a series of pictures taken with the kid. That way the pictures at your office desk or in your wallet stay up to date with your age and your co-workers do not have to suspect you rarely see the kid. You can even fake authentic child raising problems. Occasionally (but not as often as in real life child raising) when the kid gets the flu in India you could even stay home from work for a couple of days and pretend to take care of Johnnie or Jill.
A deluxe parenting surrogacy service would include a web cam accessible only by you and some camera monitoring personnel in India. When an important moment happens (e.g. your baby's first step) a camera monitoring worker could notify you and email you the video clip showing those first steps. The baby would be kept in a US-looking living room which could be made to look like your own. With the Indian surrogates care in staying away from the camera you could even show your baby's first steps to people in the office.
The problem with parenting surrogacy of course are the invitations where you are supposed to bring Junior. This is where surrogacy in Mexico might be able to compete with surrogacy in India. If the little tyke is only a short airplane hop away from where you live then the baby can be brought in just for baby birthday parties and the like.
Medical tourism surrogacy is rapidly growing.
Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
Lower prices in India make surrogacy affordable by middle class Americans.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.
This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”
Outsourcing isn't just for corporations. Outsourcing is for mothers too.
Picture groups of women in India living - and, by doing so, working - in a sort of baby factory.
ANAND, India - Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.
A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here.
While lots of the surrogacy is for local women some of it is for foreign women who can't carry a baby to term.
More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond.
They use eggs and sperm from the prospective parents, do in vitro fertilization (IVF), and then implant the resulting embryo in an Indian woman who accepts payment for carrying the baby to term. The article states an Indian woman can earn the equivalent of 15 years of salary by carrying just one pregnancy.
This is all legal in India.
Decades ago Honeywell used to run TV ads about computers for controlling commercial building heating and cooling and they'd end each ad with a guy saying "The future is today at Honeywell". Well, I increasingly feel that way about the whole world. There's increasingly science fiction quality to aspects of every day life. We are getting far enough away from the limitations of our primitive past that the future of our imaginings doesn't seem as distant and unreachable as the future seemed in the past.
50 years ago science fiction writers could write all sorts of plot elements into a story secure in the knowledge that whatever they'd describe would seem distantly futuristic. Well, it seems harder to come up with ideas about the future that sit way in the distant future. What is theoretically physically possible to do that is unlikely to happen in this century?
Most embryos created during in vitro fertilization (IVF) are eventually discarded.
MORE than 1m embryos created for fertility treatment in British clinics have been destroyed over the past 14 years, government figures have shown.
The Department of Health data show that 2,137,924 embryos were created using IVF between 1991 and 2005, but about 1.2m were never used.
While political opposition to the creation of embryos to extract embryonic stem cells remains strong the rate of destruction of embryos is already high without the use of embryos for this purpose. More embryos get created than used for a few reasons. First off, women trying to start a pregnancy using IVF get extra embryos created because they don't know how many attempts will be needed or even how many fertilizations will succeed in creating viable embryos.
Also, the development of tests (genetic and otherwise) for checking on the health of embryos leads to the identification of unhealthy embryos before implantation. These tests are becoming more powerful and as a result many embryos can be judged to either be unlikely to start a pregnancy or to result in birth defects.
The development of increasingly more powerful genetic tests for pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD or PGD) of embryos will lead prospective parents to become much more selective in choosing embryos. As the significance of more genetic variations becomes known people will have far more reasons to choose between different embryos. The trend is going to be toward the creation of far larger numbers of embryos so as to increase the odds of finding an embryo will be found that contains the best combination of genes from the two parents. Basically, people will throw the genetic dice more times in order to better their odds.
The era of large scale excess embryo creation will last a few decades at most. That era will end with the development of nanotechnological tools that will provide the means to select each chromosome to put in an egg, sperm, or embryo. Rather than throw the dice many times we'll gain the ability to basically put down the genetic dice with the combination we desire.
Some members of the British House of Lords argue that the use of donor eggs and sperm to create offspring should not be kept secret from those offspring.
Children born from donor eggs or sperm could have the information recorded on their birth certificates.
An influential group of peers yesterday called for a law change to force parents to reveal donor conceptions.
Under the proposals, a special mark next to a child's name would reveal whether he or she was conceived naturally or with the help of a donor.
Parents who tried to hide the truth from their children could be fined or imprisoned.
What do we have a right to know? Should parents get to know that their kids are not genetically from them while the kids get kept in the dark? If the kids are deceived this has at least one cost I can think of: the kids will be less able to judge what they might become because they will look the capabilities of their parents and tend to expect themselves to be similar in potentials.
But if the goal of knowing about your genetic parents is to provide useful insights about yourself then the rapid decline in the cost of genetic sequencing and testing will provide a much better way to do that by the time babies born today reach adulthood.
But knowing your genetic identity is less important than what constitutes that identify. I expect some people to object to what they've been given as their genetic inheritance. After all, what you get in your genes has huge consequences. Why won't some unhappy and angry children sue?
I see lawsuits over genetic inheritance probably in about 35 years. Once people gain the ability to choose genetic variations for their children those children will grow up, see what decisions were made for them, and sue their legal parents over the genetic choices of their parents.
The United States has fewer regulatory obstacles to the paying of egg and sperm donors and also of women who basically rent out their wombs for 9 months to bring a baby to term. This is prompting the growth of an interesting form of labor out-sourcing into the United States. Same sex couples from Australia are traveling to the United States to use US egg donors and women who can act as surrogate carriers of pregnanices to term.
SAME-sex couples from Queensland are heading to the US to buy designer babies for up to $133,000 - even specifying the gender they want.
IVF pioneer Dr Jeffrey Steinberg said an increasing number of gay and lesbian Australians were visiting his Californian fertility centre to begin a family and side-step Australian law that prohibits surrogacy.
Converted into US dollars that's about $120k. A sizable amount. Reproduction is big business.
One thought strikes me about reproductive technologies and their costs: We are going to witness DNA testing technologies become more powerful and more useful. We are also going to witness the initial introduction and growth in the power of biotechnologies for manipulating chromosomes and genes in embryos. As these things happen we will see a huge increase in the advantages to be gained from using in vitro fertilization (IVF) to create embryos outside of the womb (aka test tube babies). Yet those technologies will initially become available at high prices. Okay, so who will use them first? Wealthier people.
Since wealthier people will be the first to use reproductive technologies that boost offspring intelligence, make offspring healthier, and make offspring better looking the initial use of such technologies will boost the existing trend toward greater economic inequality. As the first wave of bioengineered children of the upper classes come of age those children will enjoy an even greater advantage over . The upper classes will become much more successful at maintaining multi-generation success stories as they become able to avoid at least some of the regression to the mean toward lower achieving offspring. Many of those who genetically engineering their children will actually produce children who are smarter, more motivated, and more socially adept than the parents of these children.
His son can't get the son's wife pregnant and so dad is going to do the job.
A 72-year-old man is due to become the father of his own "grandchild" by acting as a sperm donor for his daughter-in-law. The case is thought to be the first of its kind in the UK. The government's fertility watchdog said there was a "handful" of men over 65 on the sperm register, but some fertility experts are worried that the couple are being subjected to undue risks because the sperm is likely to have many genetic mutations accumulated during the donor's life.
Yes, there are greater risks of genetically caused disease as sperm get older. But there's another more interesting angle here: This isn't genetically incestuous since he's knocking up his daughter-in-law. But a man was going to donate sperm to his daughter. There's a big taboo against that for a couple of reasons, most obviously because recessive harmful genes are more likely to pair up and cause genetic diseases when closely related people mate.
But imagine that a brother and sister or father and daughter used genetic testing combined with in vitro fertilization to select fertilized eggs (i.e. embryos) that do not have have harmful recessive gene pairings. The resulting child won't suffer from the genetic effects of very genetically close mating. Would you think that laws against incestuous mating should still be enforced against such pairings?
Genetically safe mating of closely related people is still a hypothetical case today. But that won't always be the case. Given the rate of advance in genetic testing technologies and the accumulating evidence on the significance of human genetic differences I expect within 20 years time if not sooner we'll know enough to avoid harmful recessive pairings. At that point should incestuous mating between consenting adults remain illegal?
There's a sociobiological argument against genetically very close mating: the mating creates tribal and family divisions in society and reduces what some political scientists call "social capital". I think genetic engineering is going to create divisions between groups of humans more severe than even the existing tribal divisions that are at least partially genetic in origin.
Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.
Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males — the expulsion of girls is rarer — also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives.
Does God stand in the way of efforts to stop death from disease or from problems during birth? Of course not. God doesn't stand in the way of progress. Surely God would approve of efforts to enlist technology to surpass the Beach Boys "Two Girls For Every Boy" (and yes it was Jan and Dean but Brian Wilson co-wrote it). This would work especially well if the boys were genetically engineered to think in six part harmony.
Nowadays if men want three girls for every boy they need to find out how to get rid of two boys out of three.
Mr. Gilbert estimates that 100 boys from his school class, or 70 percent of them, have been expelled or left on their own accord; there is no way to verify the numbers.
Sex selection would avoid the need to expel boys and therefore eliminate one cause of hostility toward the polygamists. They could create communities that have less internal strife as well. Parents who expel their sons can't be happy about it. Some of them must feel terrible about it.
I predict some polygamists will eventually embrace sex selection reproductive technologies. Also, once the neurological mechanisms behind jealousy are elucidated expect polygamists to genetically engineer girl offspring to not feel jealousy in polygamist marriages.
The question we need to ask: Will polygamy still pose a problem for the larger society if a society contains three times as many women as men and if women don't feel jealous in polygamous marriages? For example, will polygamous marriages make married people more inward oriented toward family and will this reduce the social capital of societies by reducing volunteerism and civic spirit?
Update: Some people are under the misimpression that the only way to do sex selection is either to selectively abort or to use in vitro fertilization and embryo selection before implantation. Not so. Microsort can partially separate X and Y carrying sperm and shift the odds of births heavily toward boys (73% accuracy) or girls (88% accuracy). Therefore only artificial insemination is needed for sex selection. Over 8 girls for every boy if only the X selected sperm are used.
An article in the New York Times reports on the prices in the egg donor market in the United States.
A survey published this month in the journal Fertility and Sterility, “What Is Happening to the Price of Eggs?” found that the national average compensation for donors was $4,217. At least one center told the authors of the paper that it paid $15,000. Many centers did not respond.
Though laws prohibit the sale of transplant organs, sperm donors have always received small payments, and prospective parents in the United States are allowed to compensate women for their far greater expenditure of time and energy. (Many countries, including Canada and Britain, do prohibit payments to egg donors.)
I am disappointed that the average payment is so low. Why? Because if the buyers were chiefly going for the highest IQ egg donors (e.g. Ivy League, CalTech, MIT, and Stanford undergrads) then the average payment would be in the tens of thousands. Prospective parents will get smarter kids with much greater earning potential and lower risks of crime and other problems if they pay the extra money it takes to use smarter donors. The money spent up front will pay itself back many times over in the long run.
Interesting facts about regional variations come out in the abstract of this article "What is happening to the price of eggs?".
Over half SART clinics (53%, 207 out of 394) responded to the survey, with 191 (92%, 191 out of 207) having a donor oocyte program. The national average for standard donor compensation was $4,217, with a maximum payment average of $4,576. Geographic location affected compensation rates, with highest reported standard mean compensation in the East/Northeast ($5,018) and West regions ($4,890), and lowest in the Northwest ($2,900).
Why is the Northwest of the United States such a bargain would the buyers? Are more women in the Northwest willing to donate for free? Or are the Northeast and West buyers more discriminating and going for relatively smarter (and therefore more expensive) donors at higher frequencies?
Countries that prohibit payments to donors aren't taking a moral high road. The women who donate are taking health risks and might even be aging their ovaries more rapidly due to the effects of the hormones used to stimulate egg release. Plus, the lack of a market means the higher IQ women are going to be less available for donation and hence the average IQ quality and other quality of egg donors will be lower. Why contribute to lower intellectual quality of future generations by prohibiting a market in donor eggs?
Now for a repeat of predictions I've made in the past: The development of cheap DNA testing techniques will increase the desirability of using egg donors. The ability to identify women whose genes possess the best genetic alleles for one's preferences will make the use of donor eggs into a way to produce babies with more desired qualities. Testing will lower risks and at the same time improve quality of outcome.
Cheap full genome genetic testing will also cause a much greater spread in donor egg prices. Women who are now contenting themselves with $2000 or $3000 eggs will, in the future, know how much they are giving up by going with cheaper eggs. I expect a drop in demand for lower quality eggs and an even larger boost in demand for highest quality eggs.
Some of you may wish to quibble with my use of terms like "lower quality" and "highest quality" in reference to donor eggs. Granted, there is no single accepted standard on what constitutes genetic quality. But that does not matter. Each buyer will bring their own personal values and preferences to their decision-making processes and they will choose among genetic features based on their own judgments on what constitutes high quality. In other words, the market will define quality and will do so in each potential transaction.
Since people have no shortage of preferences in what they like and dislike in other people and in what they'd like their offspring to become (or not become - e.g. afflicted with diseases and disorders, criminal, crazy) I expect that given the ability to choose among donors based on detailed genetic information people will find many reasons to discriminate between the genetic profiles of lists of potential egg donors.
Cheap genetic testing is not the only forthcoming technological advance that will cause an increase the use of high priced donor eggs. In the comments of a previous post David Friedman noted that science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein described in his novel Beyond This Horizon a way to avoid the uncertainty of not knowing which of each chromosome pair will get passed down to offspring. Start with a cell that has the full genome of a donor. Under controlled conditions induce it to turn into two eggs. Then genetically test one of the eggs. From the test results and from a genetic sequencing of the entire genome one can deduce which of each chromosome pair is in the undestroyed egg of the two egg pair.
With automation of microfluidic devices this process could get repeated hundreds or thousands of times until an egg with the desired chromosomes was found. That egg could then be fertilized. The same process could be performed to create the sperm used to do the fertilization. This will enable prospective parents to get the better genetic variations from donors and hence increase the odds that use of donors will produce much higher quality results in offspring. That will increase the attractiveness of using donor cells.
When using in vitro fertilization (IVF) to start a pregnancy in a lab dish it is possible to genetically test each embryo to avoid undesirable genetic variations or to choose desired genetic variations. William Saletan reports the list of reasons people use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for embryo selection is growing.
In its early days, PGD targeted fatal childhood diseases such as Tay-Sachs. But a new survey of U.S. fertility clinics, scheduled for release this week by the Genetics and Public Policy Center, suggests the line is moving. Among clinics that offer PGD, 28 percent have used it to target genes whose associated diseases don't strike until adulthood. The list includes Alzheimer's, which afflicts some people in their 30s but usually arrives much later. According to next month's Journal of Clinical Oncology, PGD has also been used to wipe out colon cancers that don't develop until age 45 to 55 and are treatable, if detected early, with survival rates of 90 percent.
For some of these adult-onset genes, the risk of illness is less than 50 percent. But it feels mean, even arbitrary, to quibble about probabilities. American clinics target these genes anyway, to prevent "cancer predisposition syndromes," if not cancer itself. Even if your child never gets sick, just knowing he has the gene can cause anxiety, as British regulators noted four months ago when they approved PGD for colon cancer.
The use of PGD has now spread beyond just avoidance of severe diseases. Some choose to avoid genetic variations that give fairly low probabilities if particular diseases such as colon cancer. I see this as a waste of time for some diseases. A baby born today will not face serious risk of colon cancer until the 2050s. Well, I expect cancer will be easily curable or avoidable in the 2050s.
The other reason to refrain from selecting against genetic variations that create low risk of some diseases is that these variations might provide benefits as well. Functionally significant genetic variations found in substantial portions of the human population probably got selected for. For many genetic variations that cause specific disease risks also probably deliver some as yet undiscovered benefit.
Scientists are going to discover the costs and benefits of hundreds of thousand and possibly millions of genetic variations. As the significance of hundreds of thousands of genetic variations becomes known the advantages of using IVF with PGD will grow enormously. I expect at some point in industrialized countries natural conception will become less used than IVF. This transition point probably will happen in the next 30 years because we'll know what most of the genetic variations mean within 30 years.
Once we know a lot about hundreds of thousands of genetic variations then genetic testing of a dozen or so embryos is going to be viewed as too confining and constricting. IVF and PGD only let you choose among those combinations of parental DNA that actually happen in the half dozen or dozen embryos which will result from basically random arrangement of DNA from two parents. People will start pining for the ability to select which of each pair of chromosomes to give to junior.
The development of biotechnologies that enable selection between chromosomes will enable even greater control over which genetic variations parents will give to their offspring. Beyond that capability the next step will be gene therapy to create offspring that have genetic variations in combinations that could not occur as a result of normal sexual reproduction. Once that becomes possible the rate of human genetic change will skyrocket.
In the United States I am not expecting many restrictions on the use of IVF and PGD to select for desired genetic features beyond disease avoidance. As each new capability hits the market potential parents will demand the freedom to choose genetic features for many reasons. Looks and intelligence will be two big motivators for use of PGD and, further into the future, use of chromosome selection and gene therapy.
The ability to select genetic variations for offspring will make reproduction more appealing. This capability will allow lowering of many risks (e.g. of retardation, autism, attention deficit, and tendencies toward anger and criminality) The ability to reduce risks will greatly increase the likelihood that offspring will meet parental hopes. So kids will be born who are better looking, smarter, and better behaved. I expect an increase in fertility due to the increased likelihood that prospective parents will get children who will have desired features.
Thanks to Ivan Kirigin for the heads-up.
You know how much parents want their kids to make them into grandparents? A woman on the Greek island of Crete used biotechnology to turn herself into a grandmother. A Greek woman unable to carry a pregnancy turned to her mother to do the job with embryos created with in vitro fertilization (IVF).
A 52-year-old woman gave birth to her daughters’ twins on Crete thanks to the technique of in vitro fertilization (IVF), doctors at a private clinic in Hania said yesterday.
Other parts of the article quote the age as 54. The baby boys were born 2.5 lbs each. The premature delivery was not surprising given the grandmother's age. The aging of ovaries is not the only reason older women lose the ability to start viable pregnancies. The reproductive tract and the entire body decline with age as well.
Fast forward 20 or 30 years and picture a future when new ovaries and other female reproductive organs can be grown from scratch and implanted as replacements. More women will make babies in their 40s and 50s. Add in full body rejuvenation (sure to follow) and women will reproduce in their 60s and beyond.
Full body rejuvenation using Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) will inevitably cause a big uptick in fertility. The instinctive desire to reproduce and baby fever will combine with rejuvenation therapies to drive human populations up into the tens of billions unless governments restrict reproduction.
Some people argue we should die to make room for the babies that people instinctively want to create. Some people argue (really, I'm not making this up) that we humans do not have any instinctive desire to reproduce and that we can all get taught to prefer dogs and cats to human babies. That naive Blank Slate thinking belongs in the 20th century along with lots of other foolish 20th century ideas. If we are going to reason about the future in a realistic fashion we need to come to grips with human nature as it exists, not as social engineers would like it to be.
7 year old Canadian Flavie Boivin might some day give birth to her brother or sister.
MONTREAL - In what is considered a world first, Melanie Boivin has donated her eggs to her daughter who is sterile because of a genetic condition called Turner's syndrome.
The Montreal lawyer's eggs are to be frozen until her seven-year-old daughter, Flavie, becomes of age to bear a child through in-vitro fertilization.
If Flavie has a daughter from one of these eggs the baby will have a grandmother who is also her mother. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. Suppose a woman gave birth to a daughter from eggs donated from her great grandmother. The daughter would also be her mom's great aunt.
Kutluk Oktay, a renowned expert in preserving fertility at the Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at Cornell University in New York, said egg-freezing technology has "changed drastically in the last couple of years and is now being seen as the next breakthrough in reproductive medicine."
"The procedure will be seen as an established part of fertility care . . . within the next five years," he predicted.
Although questions remain around which method of freezing eggs is best, Dr. Oktay said McGill's fast-freezing technique -- known as vitrification -- "looks extremely promising."
Egg-freezing will become even more popular for women who want to assure that they still have viable eggs when they are able to afford the time to raise children. A woman pursuing a career and unable to find Mr. Right could put off children until her 40s by using frozen eggs she put away while still in her 20s.
I consider this all pretty small stuff compared to embryo genetic engineering. Imagine a woman deciding to build an embryo using chromosomes taken from 5 different men. Each man might carry some chromosome that has a genetic trait she wants. Or she might solicit all her girlfriends to chip in a chromosome or two. Get blue eyes and pretty face from Kathy, resistance to depression and stress from the indomitable Sally, and a sharp mind from Sue.
The ability to select individual chromosomes and assemble them together into an egg, sperm, or embryo will break the link between parenthood and parental genetic endowment. Add in the ability to modify genetic sequences and the rate of human evolution will skyrocket. Your guess is as good as mind on the question of where this will all lead.
Gene Expression blogger Razib has written some thoughts on evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi's expectations for the future of eugenics (labelled neo-eugenics to try to distance it from eugenics advocacy of previous eras)
To greatly reduce the rate of mutations in births requires widespread screening and a willingness to abort based on the results. Or genetically screen IVF embryos before implantation. In the longer run we will gain the ability to do gene therapy to repair genetic defects in embryos. But due to the risks involved and likely regulatory resistance I expect that's decades away from routine procedure.
If all embryos were screened and if women halted all pregnancies which have genetic defects the percentage of births with genetic diseases avoided would be pretty low.
Notice the emphasis on known. Of course many more unknown purely harmful mutations will be found in the coming years. So the incentive to screen to avoid harmful mutations will rise.
Also, we will come across many more mutations that provide benefits under some conditions (e.g the sickle cell anemia mutation which confers malaria resistance) but at painful costs. Expect quite divisive controversies on which genetic variations are harms and which are benefits.
Some argue against all attempts to prevent the birth of babies with genetic diseases. Others argue against specific methods (e.g. abortion) to avoid such births. Still others argue that abortion or pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD - used before implantation of embryos created with in vitro fertilization) are acceptable only to avoid true genetic defects.
The argument for restricting the use of, say, PGD only to avoid genetic defects immediately runs up against the question of what is a genetic defect and what is a genetic disease. The genetic variation for sickle cell anemia was selected for because it conferred resistance to malaria. It was not a defect for those who it helped to survive malaria infection.
I predict we will find many genetic variations that confer some benefit at some cost. Sometimes the benefit will be irrelevant under modern conditions (e.g. sickle cell anemia for someone living in temperate climes or with benefit of drugs). But that won't always be the case. Real thorny ones will involve trade-offs that come from genetic variations that provide both high costs and high benefits.
For example, imagine a genetic variation that boosts IQ at the cost of greater chances of feeling depressed if one encounters tough times. Or imagine a genetic variation that allows one to live longer but at the cost of making one more lethargic. People will argue to select for or against all manner of genetic variations.
Cost and benefit calculations will depend in part on one's values. But one's expectations of future technological advances will also figure into the question of what is a cost and what is a benefit. Suppose some genetic variation increases a woman's chance of breast cancer in her thirties but also will raise her intelligence. That might well be the case for the BRCA gene variations that contribute to cancer risk. A person might plausibly argue against selecting out such variations on the theory that 30 or 40 years from now cancer will become easily curable.
To screen most effectively requires use of in vitro fertilization (IVF).
A major caution about massive genetic preimplantation screens is that they would be preimplantation. That is, some sort of IVF would be needed. It seems implausible that this would be widespread, but Leroi points out that IVF procedures already make up several percent of the pregnancies in Western nations. The cost of a typical IVF procedure is that of a medium sized car, and crucially, the cost of many diseases over one's lifetime is far greater (IVF would be like "insurance").
As the number of genetic variations one wishes to avoid rises so does the need for IVF and genetic screening on multiple embryos. But the greater the number of genetic variations to avoid or to selective for the greater the potential benefit.
As we learn the significance of large numbers of genetic variations the primary motivation for gene selection will be to get desired features rather than to avoid genetic diseases. The desire for higher intelligence will make IVF become the preferred way to create babies for one reason: People will embrace IVF to make smarter babies. They'll also embrace it to make better looking children. The prospect of better smarts and looks will cause prospective parents to embrace IVF and genetic screening with a passion.
Armand's piece points out several important issues. First, the new eugenics is already here. Second, the new eugenics will become more powerful as information gathering via genomics becomes more omniscient, and medical interventions in fertility become more omnipotent. Third, there is variance in the extent that different individuals and groups are willing to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by the new eugenics.
Smarter and higher economic class people will embrace eugenic technologies more rapidly and more enthusiastically. The smarties will select for smarter children with attributes that will make them more successful. Therefore I predict a widening of the gaps between the most and least successful segments of societies and of the gaps between societies.
Elites will promote subsidies and propaganda campaigns to encourage the cognitively less able and poorer people to also use eugenic reproductive technologies. But even when the dumber folks opt to use genetic screening they'll make less optimal choices for their offspring.
I would add a fourth point to the three points Razib enumerates: Those who will avail themselves of methods to select offspring genetic endowments will make different average decisions as members of different societies, races, religions, and other groupings. This will tend to cause a divergence of the human race into groups that will become more genetically dissimilar. Genetic variations that cause differences in methods of cognitive processing will have the greatest political impact as groups clash due to genetically caused differences in values and in understandings of the world.
An article in the New York Times reports on prospective parents who select for offspring who share their genetically caused disabilities.
Wanting to have children who follow in one’s footsteps is an understandable desire. But a coming article in the journal Fertility and Sterility offers a fascinating glimpse into how far some parents may go to ensure that their children stay in their world — by intentionally choosing malfunctioning genes that produce disabilities like deafness or dwarfism.
The parents use in vitro fertilization (IVF or test tube babies) combined with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD or PGD) to choose embryos to implant in a woman that will carry a genetic defect that will cause their children to have the same disability that the parents have.
Yet Susannah A. Baruch and colleagues at the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University recently surveyed 190 American P.G.D. clinics, and found that 3 percent reported having intentionally used P.G.D. “to select an embryo for the presence of a disability.”
Mind you, they aren't saying that 3% of all PGD uses are to select for disabilities. They are saying 3% of clinics have done this sort of selection at least once. But the article also reports that other clinics have turned down these sorts of requests from potential customers. That raises the possibility that prospective parents will respond by seeking out the clinics that are willing to select for disabilities.
The article points out that while PGD improves the reliability of attempts to select for defects deaf lesbian women have used sperm from deaf sperm donors to achieve this sort of objective. Have any women intentionally chosen donor eggs from genetically defective egg donors as well? My guess is this has already happened and will again.
One of my great worries for the future is over the question of what qualities will people choose for their children when they gain the ability to choose many more genetic characteristics of their offspring. Deaf or dwarf people who choose to have deaf or dwarf offspring are especially troubling for what they say about the potential for humans to make rather clannish decisions to promote creation of separate groups.
I'm especially worried about choices that will determine aspects of personality and instincts. People may decide to give their sons aggressive instincts that, as a side effect, make them more likely to be violent. Or they may cut back on the instinct to carry out altruistic punishment or the capacity to feel empathy so that their kids focus more on their own success.
Genetically caused qualities of human minds make a free society possible. An overlapping but not identical set of genetically caused qualities of the mind make a modern technological society possible. Will those qualities become more or less common when people gain the ability to select genetic variations for their offspring?
The sale of eggs is illegal in this country, but in America, the industry is worth an estimated $4.5bn (£2.4bn). Donors with the right physical, personal and intellectual attributes can attract fees of up to $35,000 for their eggs, with some in the industry claiming that as much as $50,000 has changed hands. Prices are rising, too: in New York, average eggs are fetching $8,000. About 15 years ago, the comparable figure was closer to $1,000.
The people who are paying only $8000 for eggs are making bad investment decisions. Top quality is worth paying for when it comes to the genetic inheritance of your children.
British women, banned from selling their eggs in Britain, are increasingly offering their eggs for sale in laissez faire America.
Now British women - including 25-year-old Alexandra Saunders of High Wycombe, who this week advertised her eggs on the internet to pay off a £15,000 credit card debt - are following suit.
Though a woman who would run up a nearly $30,000 credit card debt strikes me perhaps lacking in genes that contribute to prudence and the ability to engage in careful financial planning.
The article quotes an an American egg brokerage web site which claims it has experienced a 25% increase in applications by British women who want to sell their eggs. It seems likely British buyers are also travelling to the United States to get eggs and to get them fertilized and implanted while here. That's a lot more expensive than it need be. If the British government would get over their socialist view that eggs shouldn't be sold they'd save British buyers and sellers a lot of time, money, and aggravation.
There's an underground egg trade in Britain where the market participants try to find ways around the regulatory limitations.
Controversially, one of the UK's leading fertility experts, Dr Mohammed Taranissi, has argued that payment for eggs was already a reality in the UK. Dr Taranissi, director of Britain's most successful fertility clinic, the Assisted Reproduction and Gynaecology Centre in London, said that, via sizeable "expenses" for donors and free IVF treatment for those involved in egg-sharing programmes, payment was being made in different ways by clinics.
Given the risks and impositions of egg donations it seems entirely unfair for a government to tell women they do not have a right to charge what the market will bear for egg donation. The risks involved in use of fertility drugs to cause extra egg production might even include chromosomal damage to eggs in the ovaries. Governments should not limit how much women can charge for running these risks.
Those Danes are doing their manly duty to bring new babies into this world. Limits on sperm donation in many European countries have driven Denmark to the top of the European donor sperm trade.
In the same way that some nations have oil fields or bread mountains, Denmark boasts an ever-growing sperm lake. The vault at Cryos HQ holds around 75,000 straws. It is far too much sperm for a nation where only 65,000 children are born each year, so Denmark is a net exporter. The efforts of the men of Arhus, Odense and Copenhagen have helped to engender an estimated 12,000 children around the world, and each year “the Danish stuff” brings forth some 1,400 more.
An embarrassment of riches in Denmark has corresponded to a scarcity of donor sperm almost everywhere else. In Britain, as in Norway and Sweden, new regulations ending anonymity for sperm donors has decimated the ranks of men once willing to donate, while in April the arrival of the EU Tissue Directive is likely to make sperm banking a harder business to manage on a small scale. Cryos could yet emerge with something of a monopoly on the European market.
The London Bridge centre once supplied donor sperm to most UK fertility clinics. “We now just about meet our own needs,” says Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, medical director. Previously, up to 15 UK clinics relied on semen from Cryos, but such imports are now restricted. “We send our most urgent cases to clinics in Denmark,” says Grudzinskas.
6% of Danish babies are born with the help of assisted reproduction technology (ART). The United States is lagging Denmark in terms of the percentage of women using ART. I suspect that is because Denmark has an older population and so a larger percentage of Danish women who are trying to conceive are in their 30s and 40s. Here's how fast Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART) usage has increased in the United States: (the CDC lags in reporting national results by a few years)
Those 48,756 live births represent over 1% of total babies born in the United States in 2003.
Getting back to the second article, since sperm is much easier and less risky to produce the size of the sperm market in monetary terms is very small. Given the decline in the dollar you can almost multiply by 2 to convert these figures to dollars.
The global market for sperm exports has been estimated at between £25 million and £50 million a year. The US market is worth £5 million and £10 million and the European market is of similar size.
These are small amounts in dollars too. The article also reports on British women travelling to Spain to buy eggs. The sale of eggs isn't legal in Spain but the cost of the effort can be paid. This sounds like in America where technically eggs can't be sold but women can charge what the market will bear for the time they spend donating the eggs.
If you are in the market for sperm you definitely should go for top quality donors in terms of intellect, health, physical appearance, accomplisments, and desired personality characteristics. Even the best do not cost much. Scrimping on sperm donor costs is very foolish. Go for 140+ IQ donors.
European women are travelling to Denmark, Ireland, Belgium and Finland to buy sperm (often from the supplier Cryos of Denmark) because sperm donation is more difficult in other European countries. In many European countries sperm donation is difficult because donors are not allowed to be anonymous. Guys don't want junior knocking on the door 15 years later when they are raising their own families.
An article in the Washington Post reports claims by fertility clinics and couples looking for donor eggs that Asian egg donors in the United States are hard to find.
But as egg donation has surged over the past two decades, clinics and donor recruiting agencies say the supply of ethnic minority donors, especially Asians, has not kept pace with demand. For reasons probably involving complex cultural attitudes about fertility and basic marketing principles, Asian eggs are hard to find.
This strikes me as a temporary problem. Higher prices will bring forward more donors. Asian ethnics would be smart to advertise in college newspapers at elite colleges to get eggs from smarter students. The costs are higher. But the benefit of having smarter kids on average will pay itself back many times over.
Clinics that are offering only $6000 could always raise their offering prices. Surely some of their customers could afford to pay more. The money is a very small portion of the total costs for raising a kid.
Donors are usually in their fertile 20s. After passing medical and psychological tests, they inject themselves with hormone stimulants for about one month. They are then anesthetized while a physician removes the eggs with a needle. Most clinics in the Washington region pay donors about $6,000.
The Web site of the Washington Fertility Center asks for "urgently needed" Chinese, Ethiopian, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Filipino and Vietnamese donors. Recently, its online donor database featured 152 donor profiles. Among the donors were two of Middle Eastern descent and 10 Asians, of whom one was part Indian -- one of the rarest donor ethnicities, doctors say.
Some are afraid to tell their relatives and friends they can't start a pregnancy.
Because infertility is seen as failure in some cultures, and because adoption is uncommon among Asians and Muslims, some observers speculate that despairing infertile couples opt for egg donation without telling anyone -- which also prevents them from asking relatives or friends to be donors. That secrecy makes a donor of the same ethnicity even more crucial, doctors say.
To women of those wanted ethnicities who want to make money selling their eggs: Ask yourself how much money it would take to make it worth going through the time and effort and risks from ovary stimulation drugs such as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. My advice: Demand what you think will make it worth the risks and trouble.. If you are provably very smart (e.g. very high IQ, high SAT scores, advanced scientific or medical degrees) then demand tens of thousands of dollars. If you offer to sell your eggs try to get top dollar.
The article reports on the practice of Indian Americans buying eggs in India. This allows selection of donors from the same caste and region.
When genetic testing becomes cheap and detailed in what it reveals I expect to see a large increase in the use of donor eggs. The advantages of donor eggs will become greater once eggs can be chosen to produce healthier, smarter, better looking, and better behaved kids.
Audacious Epigone provides a link to an article about the prices for adoption babies and the anger that some feel about prices put on humans.
When a couple seeking to adopt a white baby is charged $35,000 and a couple seeking a black baby is charged $4,000, the image that comes to the Rev. Ken Hutcherson's mind is of a practice that was outlawed in America nearly 150 years ago — the buying and selling of human beings.
My reaction to the moral objection about prices: Would you prefer that babies be seen as worth nothing? Or do you want to force people to pay much higher prices?
My more practical reaction: A measly $35k? The white baby price is still far less than the $50,000 price which some Stanford student donor eggs fetch. The donor eggs of elite school students have much higher chances of resulting in higher IQ babies.
But the prices for the babies and for the high IQ donor eggs looked at together suggest another interesting possibility for the future: Genetically engineered babies created by women who plan to sell them once the babies are born.
Think about why the Stanford and Harvard undergrad women can command such high prices for their eggs as compared to the prices for babies. First off, a lot of women who can't produce viable eggs from their own ovaries still want the experience of pregnancy and birth. Also, a couple where the woman can't produce viable eggs still typically wants to use the husband's sperm. So those factors put limits on the demand for fully developed babies.
But another limit on the demand for babies (and it is a reason you'll rarely see publically expressed) is the widely but privately held opinion (gotta watch out for the commissars) that women who are getting pregnant out of wedlock and who want to give up their babies for adoption are lower class, lower IQ, and lower quality in other ways that are at least partially genetic in origin. However, shift ahead 15 or 20 years to when DNA testing is cheap and very comprehensive in what it can reveal. Shift ahead perhaps even further to when egg, sperm, and embryo genetic engineering is practical. The ability to modify the genes of the embryo will enable even lower class women to give birth to babies that have high intelligence, great looks, great health, and assorted desired personality traits.
Biotechnology will enable the production of more customized products. The ability to basically sell a more customized product will raise demand and market prices. This will allow some women to make money producing and selling babies.
Even before embryo genetic engineering becomes possible the market for adoptive babies will go through a big shift as a result of biotechnological advances. In particular, cheap genetic testing will cause a big differentiation of the market. Babies which today are indistinguishable will come to be seen as very different from each other in mental abilities, personalities, future career prospects, and the likelihood of behavioral problems and diseases.
The ability to genetically test babies on the adoption market will change incentives for single women on whether to get knocked up and by who. Single women who get their DNA tested and find they have highly desired features will be able to select donor sperm of men who also have highly desired features and make babies which will fetch much higher prices on the adoption market. So genetic testing combined with (a preferably legal) adoption market should raise the quality of babies born out of wedlock.
But other advances in reproductive biotechnology will limit the development of the donor egg and adopted baby markets. Most notably, advances in the treatment of fertility problems will reduce the need for couples to turn to donor eggs and adoption. Stem cell manipulations will produce viable eggs and sperm made of a couple's own DNA. Most people will prefer their own DNA for producing their babies over that of strangers.
The donor egg market may, in any case, face an increasingly hostile regulatory environment. While a debate rages in Britain as to whether to loosen restrictions on payment to egg donors the wind in California is blowing in the opposite direction. Governor Schwarzenegger faces a decision on whether to sign legislation that would ban the sale of eggs by private parties.
Hoping to preempt a controversy, the authors of California's Proposition 71, approved in 2004, declared that scientists who received grants from the $3-billion state stem cell agency could not pay egg donors but merely reimburse their expenses.
A bill now on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk, sponsored by state Sens. Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento) and George Runner (R-Lancaster), would extend those payment restrictions to privately funded laboratories.
Feminists are behind this attempt to reduce reproductive choices.
The Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland and the Pro-Choice Alliance for Responsible Research in Los Angeles are two of the most vocal supporters of the measure. Both describe themselves as staunchly feminist.
They imagine that they are protecting lower class Hispanic and black women from exploitation.
Emily Galpern, reproductive health and human rights director for the Center for Genetics and Society, said she feared that without the legislation, poor and minority women would be exploited for their eggs.
News flash to Emily Galpern: The poor black and Hispanic women aren't getting much "exploitation" from egg buyers as market prices for eggs attest. Upper class male patriarchal white capitalist exploiters with the money to spend on expensive eggs aren't beating a path to the doors of poor women wanting to buy their eggs. The big demand is for Ivy League egg and sperm donors who the upper class (correctly) see as possessing the right genetic alleles for giving birth to smarter babies with higher potential for success in the marketplace. Plus, I'm guessing the upper class parents simply want kids who have the capacity to become their intellectual peers.
That legislation mentioned above was signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger
Update: Currently the US has the biggest market for genetic material.
The United States is one of many countries in which legislation and social norms proscribe the selling of body parts. It is also the world capital of the genetic material market: No other nation trades in DNA so widely and freely. Hopeful mothers and cash-strapped college students have been trading cash for eggs for 20 years, calling the ova a “donation” and the money compensation for time and discomfort, thus avoiding the ban on sales. Outside Food and Drug Administration mandates regarding the importance of testing donors for specific diseases and monitoring their progress, there are no federal laws restricting egg donors in the U.S.; elsewhere, the laws reflect a surprising lack of consensus on the issue. In Germany, Denmark, and Italy, egg donation is completely illegal. In Israel, payment for eggs can cover only the direct expenses related to the procedure. In the U.K., eggs are classified as organs, and payment is banned.
The rate of advance of reproductive biotechnology will slow if that market becomes subject to bans on the sale of eggs and sperm.
Though the group expresses some concern about exploitation of women who sell their eggs for in vitro fertilization, it notes that these donors tend to be white, well educated and well paid — often $5,000 to $50,000 because of the demand for their genetic material.
Stem cell researchers, in contrast, seek eggs only as a vehicle for someone else's DNA — so all viable eggs can be used, regardless of class or race.
Eventually stem cell researchers will need eggs with specific qualities. For example, they might want eggs from women who carry traits that cause genetic diseases. The ability to offer to pay those women could help to find and bring forward women to donate eggs with the needed genetic variations.
The stem cell researchers are not trying to use eggs that come from smart and good looking women. Some people (academics - probably left-wing) are upset that the smart and good looking women can still sell their eggs for top dollar.
Other critics say it's illogical to regulate payments to some egg donors but not others.
"Shouldn't we be worried about the women" donating eggs to fertility clinics? asked Radhika Rao, of UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and a member of a state commission that crafted guidelines for stem cell research. "If you pay women a lot and they're white, it isn't exploitation?"
To Radhika Rao: Why not decide that it is not exploitation in either case? I realize that isn't sufficiently Marxist for some tastes. But might it be true? If not, why not?
As a friend of mine likes to say: There's only one thing worse than being exploited: Not being exploited. What, no capitalist wants to pay you? Bummer when that happens.
A Japanese woman in her 50s gave birth to her own grandchild last year, using an egg from her daughter and sperm from her son-in-law, a doctor has revealed.
It was the first time a woman has acted as a surrogate mother for her daughter in Japan, local media reported.
The case is set to stir debate in Japan where surrogate births are opposed by the government and a key medical group.
The genetic mother and father had to adopt the child (whose sex was not revealed). The Japanese government recognizes the birth mother as the legal mother.
Both Britain and the US have already had cases of grandmother surrogacy.
Kazumasa Hoshino, professor emeritus of life ethics at Kyoto University, said four cases of surrogate births in which grandmothers acted as surrogate mothers had been reported overseas--two each in Britain and the United States--since the 1990s.
Surrogacy could also be swapped around in the opposite order between generations: A daughter could serve as surrogate for her mother and then the daughter could give birth to her own brother or sister. Has anyone done that yet?
But wait, there's more: How about the possibilities that come with egg and embryo freezing? A woman in her 20s who already has a 7 year old daughter could freeze, say, some eggs, then 30 years later her granddaughter could give birth to the granddaughter's aunt or uncle.
Japan's lack of recognition for genetic parents of babies born to surrogates has generated a high profile court case. A Japanese celebrity couple is fighting a legal battle to have themselves declared the parents of their twins who were born to an American woman.
Shinagawa Ward in Tokyo has appealed a court ruling that it must officially register twins who were born to a Japanese couple through an American surrogate mother.
The ward, under instructions from the Justice Ministry, appealed the Tokyo High Court's Sept. 29 ruling that the children of TV celebrity Aki Mukai, 41, and former professional wrestler Nobuhiko Takada, 44, should be registered in consideration of their welfare.
"I hope the Supreme Court will make a decision with my children's happiness in mind," Mukai said following Shinagawa's move. "If it's a decision that we can explain to my children well when they grow up, we can accept it even if it is not in our favor."
One of the fun things about biotechnology is that it creates situations that challenge traditional notions of family.
The well-educated are significantly more open to the idea of "designing" babies than the poorly educated, according to a new study by psychologists at the University of East Anglia.
Here's a summary of some of the findings of this research group:
Once genetic engineering of embryos allows prospective parents to make their kids smarter, better looking, higher athletic performers, and with more desired personality traits all the reticence about genetic engineering for non-medical reasons will go out the window. I'm expecting a stampede toward offspring genetic engineering once it becomes possible.
Higher education is a proxy for higher intelligence. The correlation is not exactly 1 but it is very high. The more highly educated and smarter people will more rapidly and deeply develop a grasp of what offspring genetic engineering can deliver. Also, since the smarter have higher incomes on average they will be better able to pay for genetic tinkering than will poor people.
With the cognitive elite stampeding to make their kids have 150 IQs the less bright and downright dim will be left in the dust. Society will become even more divided by intellectual ability than it already is.
Offspring genetic engineering will also create inter-generational rifts as younger smarter people find less in common with older less bright people.
I am expecting a portion of the cognitive elite to demand that governments pay for free genetic engineering for anyone who plans to have a baby. But if the less bright are left to choose which genetic enhancements to give to their developing fetuses will they place a high value on raising intelligence?
The New York Times reports couple using in vitro fertilization (IVF) and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD or PIGD) are screening for genes that affect cancer risk in order to select against embryos that have a higher risk of cancer.
Prospective parents have been using the procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D., for more than a decade to screen for genes certain to cause childhood diseases that are severe and largely untreatable.
Now a growing number of couples like the Kingsburys are crossing a new threshold for parental intervention in the genetic makeup of their offspring: They are using P.G.D. to detect a predisposition to cancers that may or may not develop later in life, and are often treatable if they do.
For most parents who have used preimplantation diagnosis, the burden of playing God has been trumped by the near certainty that diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia will afflict the children who carry the genetic mutation that causes them. The procedure has also been used to avoid passing on Huntington’s disease, a severe neurological disease that typically does not surface until middle age but spares no one who carries the mutation that causes it.
I suspect as meaning of more genetic variations get identified that selection to lower cancer risk will eventually lose out to selection for other qualities. This will happen in part as a result of the development of better treatments for cancer. Also, as the significance of more genetic variations become known people will weigh cancer risk against advantages and disadvantages of other genetic variations found in each embryo.
Australian fertility clinics that do IVF (in vitro fertilization) also are now offering tests for genetic variations that increase cancer risks.
The tests pick up mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, Dr Leeanda Wilton, head of the Genetic and Molecular Research Lab at Melbourne IVF, told a recent international conference in Brisbane.
...
This technique can also detect mutations in the BRCA genes, which confer an estimated 65-85% risk of the carrier developing breast cancer by the age of 70.
Suppose a gene therapy to breasts to correct the BRCA gene only in breast tissue is developed 10 or 20 years after an IVF baby is born. Well, selecting against BRCA variants for breast cancer risk reduction will turn out to be unnecessary.
I suspect the people who are selecting against BRCA1 and BRCA2 in their offspring are making a poor trade-off without even being aware they are making a trade-off. If Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending are correct the genetic variations that occur at higher rates in Ashkenazi Jews which cause health problems (including BRCA1 and BRCA2) are there due to selection for higher intelligence during the Middle Ages. Then selecting out BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations using PGID and IVF will result in dumber offspring. Henry Harpending explains that BRCA1 probably accelerates early central nervous system (CNS) development at the expense of higher breast cancer risk later on:
Re mechanism: The argument (well known to breeders where there is no argument) goes like this: In a drastic new environment there is big fitness payoff to IQ. In this new environment there is a payoff to "turning down" BRCA1 to free up early CNS development but at the cost of higher cancer rates later in life. Eventually, especially in a big population, a BRCA1 variant with the optimum activity will show up. Meanwhile carriers of one normal and one broken BRCA1 gene have a big fitness advantage because they have, say, 90% of normal suppression of early CNS development. So the broken BRCA1 allele is favored by selection even though homozygotes for it die. After a long time it would be replaced by the optimum allele but it takes a long time for that optimum allele to show up.
But if biomedical advances will produce cures for cancer within 20 years (and I'd be very very surprised if they didn't) then for the BRCA variations the trade-off for getting lower cancer risk at the expense of lower intelligence is a bad choice to make today. Better to boost the risk of a disease that will become easy curable before the disease is likely to develop and give your daughter higher IQ. The higher IQ will be a tremendous asset throughout life. The cancer problem will be fixable. If you believe as I do that the rate of biotechnological advance is accelerating so rapidly that cancer will become curable before babies born today reach their 30s then the risk of increased breast cancer is a price worth paying in order to give your daughter a smarter brain.
I predict most of us will live to see the day that donor egg banks offer eggs with the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations as selling points.
A London School of Economics philosophy professor Luc Bovens speculated that perhaps the rhythm method of birth control leads to many more conceptions that happen as eggs are becoming less viable and therefore the embryos do not survive?
It is believed that the method works because it prevents conception from occurring. But says Professor Bovens, it may owe much of its success to the fact that embryos conceived on the fringes of the fertile period are less viable than those conceived towards the middle.
We don’t know how much lower embryo viability is outside this fertile period, contends Professor Bovens, but we can calculate that two to three embryos will have died every time the rhythm method results in a pregnancy.
Is it not just as callous to organise your sex life to make it harder for a fertilised egg to survive, using this method, as it is to use the coil or the morning after pill, he asks?
Professor Bovens cites Randy Alcorn, a US pro-life campaigner, who has equated global oral contraceptive use to chemical abortion that is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths of embryos, or unborn children, every year.
But says Professor Bovens: if all oral contraceptive users converted to the rhythm method, then they would be effectively causing the deaths of millions of embryos.
Similarly, regular condom users, whose choice of contraception is deemed to be 95% effective in preventing pregnancy, would “cause less embryonic deaths than the rhythm method,” he says.
“…the rhythm method may well be responsible for massive embryonic death, and the same logic that turned pro-lifers away from morning after pills, IUDs, and pill usage, should also make them nervous about the rhythm method,” he contends.
If embryo death is morally the equivalent of the death of a full human then practices that lead to more embryo deaths should be seen as morally undesirable.
I do not see a clear dividing line between what is human and what is not human. This problem is going to become more obvious to the general population when biotechnology allows the creation of beings that are sentient and yet very unlike the average human.
Also (and I'm digressing here) as another sign that I'm a thorough heretic from secular liberal dogma: I do not see how all humans can be classified as having equal human rights. Humans do not have equal capacities to respect the rights of others (don't believe me? want your kids to live next to a pedophile?). So how can they have equal rights? Seems to me that rights flow from the capacity to respect rights. Seems to me one has to embrace a supernatural belief (God loves us all and we all have spirits) or become thoroughly unempirical about the nature of this world in order to believe we all should have equal rights.
I've only glanced through it but here's the paper (PDF format) which is getting published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
An excellent article by David Kelly and Gary Cohn of the Los Angeles Times provides an overview of Mormon splinter sects which practice polygamy.
COLORADO CITY, Ariz. — For half a century, while polygamous members of this remote enclave engaged in widespread sexual abuse and child exploitation, government authorities on all levels did little to intervene or protect generations of victims.
Here in the sparsely populated canyon lands straddling Arizona and Utah, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS — an offshoot of Mormonism — live by their own rules.
The expulsion of boys of at the early ages of 13 and 14 for rules infractions is one of the more amazing things the polygamists do. In order to have enough women to go around they have to have fewer men.
Boys are thrown out of town, abandoned like unwanted pets by the side of the road and forcibly ostracized from their families to reduce competition among the men for multiple wives.
Children routinely leave school at age 11 or 12 to work at hazardous construction jobs. Boys can be seen piloting dump trucks, backhoes, forklifts and other heavy equipment.
Girls work at home, trying to keep order in enormous families with multiple mothers and dozens of children who often eat in shifts around picnic tables.
Wives are threatened with mental institutions if they fail to "keep sweet," or obedient, for their husbands.
I think polygamy may become more prevalent in the future and I think advances in biotechnology will make this possible. First of consider that the polygamists face two problems (legal problems aside) as far as human nature is concerned: A) They need several women per man and yet their babies are born like others with nearly equal ratio between males and females; and B) Women want husbands of their own, not shared. Biotechnically speaking, these are both solvable problems.
First off, a company called Microsort can already solve the sex ratio problem (though I suspect they would avoid knowingly doing business with polygamists). They have a method of sorting sperm that selects out male and female sperm (i.e. sperm with Y versus X chromosomes). This method isn't 100% efficient. But the technology could be used to produce offspring that are overwhelmingly female. Also, selective abortion guided by ultrasound sex detection is widely used in India and China to abort a substantial fraction of all female fetuses. The same technology could instead guide selective abortion of male fetuses of women in polygynous marriages.
In the longer run easier and cheaper methods to select offspring sex will become available. Methods that do not require cooperation of a company or even of a doctor and which are much cheaper will eventually lower the barriers for doing offspring sex selection. When such technologies become available I would be surprised if polygamous religious sects do not use them.
Then there's the problem of human nature. Consider that these polygamists are already managing to condition many women into lives of polygynous wives (polygyny is one husband and many wives) and that they succeed in this in spite of human nature as it exists today. Imagine the world 10 years hence when we will know many genetic variations that influence the tendencies toward jealousy, possessiveness, promiscuity, and other personality characteristics that affect mating behavior. Just by selecting among existing genetic variations it will be possible to have female offspring that will find polygyny more tolerable than the average woman does today.
Knowledge of genetic variations which generate the existing range of cognitive characteristics will inevitably lead to the development new genetic variations that widen the range of human desires, urges, instinctive responses, and other behavioral tendencies. I expect scientists will accidentally if not intentionally discover how to produce females who will find polygyny much easier to accept and even to enjoy.
When I look at the hold that charismatic leaders have over their followers, the extreme demands those leaders can successfully make on their followers (e.g. expel your 13 year old son from the community by leaving him somewhere along side a road), and also the assortment of sects (whether religious or secular) that exist today one conclusion I draw from this is that people in various sects (not just polygamist offshoots of the Mormons) will use biotechnologies to achieve their group goals. Some sects will genetically engineer offspring to have characteristics that make them more ideal members of their sect.
Sect leaders will tell their followers that God has entrusted them with the responsibility to make the perfect followers of their doctrines and to create offspring that will better serve God's will. I fully expect we will see members of both small religious sects and major religions genetically engineering their offspring to make better believers and better livers of their doctrines. I do not expect legal barriers to prevent this. There are nearly 200 countries in the world. Some are highly corrupt. Some will allow this to take place in their borders either legally or in exchange for bribes.
Of all the religious sects that will do genetic engineering to make better followers I do not see polygamists who genetically engineer girls to have low jealousy as posing anywhere near the biggest problem for the rest of societies. Sects that make people more intolerant of non-believers and more devout in whatever they believe strike me as far more problematic.
Single women in their 30s and 40s are to be allowed free fertility treatment on the NHS as record numbers opt for motherhood without a man. Hospital trusts are rewriting their policies in response to demand from singletons who have lost out in the relationship stakes, either because they have been unable to find the right man or because their partners are against parenthood.
The demographic profile of single moms giving birth in their 30s is a lot more upscale and educated than is the case for teen single moms. These older single moms have more intellectual and financial resources than the stereotypical high school drop-out teen mom.
An insider at unit of the NHS expects the Camden primary care trust to start offering fertility treatments to single women.
In a pioneering move, Camden primary care trust in London is considering the introduction of free treatment for single women because of the huge demand from childless but financially secure would-be mothers.
One insider said the plan, which is expected to get the go-ahead at a funding meeting later this month, was a "sea change" from 10 years ago and would prompt other trusts to follow suit.
I've argued in the past that once cheap DNA sequencing allows detailed comparison of sperm donors more women will opt to use sperm donors. Single women in their 30s and 40s are going to become more inclined to start pregnancies on their own when the technologies available will let them select sperm that will give them much smarter, healthier, better looking, and better behaved children.
Sperm donor screening with cheap DNA sequencing, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PIGD or PGD), and other reproductive technologies will lower the risks of reproduction. The lowered risks and rosier projected outcomes (yes, Jill or Johnnie will have the intellectual resources to easily excel in challenging high status professions) will lead more women to choose to have children on their own. What is more startling is that those children born to single moms who select a genetically screened sperm donor for higher cognitive ability will be more successful as adults on average compared to children created naturally and born to married couples. The conservative family argument that children born to married parents turn out better will need a big qualifier: Naturally conceived children born to married parents will still do better than naturally conceived children born to single women. But relatively less natural conception using genetically conceived sperm will produce much better results on average.
Granted, Mr. and Mrs. medical doctor couples and Mr. and Mrs. Harvard Law graduate couples will have smarter kids than the average woman who conceives with a sperm donor. But those couples are way above average in genetic endowments for cognitive abilities. Women who have babies using sperm selected for high cognitive ability are going to have smarter (and healthier and better looking) children.
The uptake of reproductive technologies has become so big that it has noticably increased the rate of twin births. The rate of twins births in the United States has doubled since 1971 due to older moms and fertility treatments.
The twin birth rate, which stood at about 1 in 60 in 1971, has risen rapidly because of fertility treatments and an increase in the number of older moms, with almost 1 in 30 American babies now being born as part of a pair.
That's a figure that is unprecedented anywhere in the world, according to Dr. Louis Keith, an emeritus professor at Northwestern University's medical school.
"The real epidemic of twins didn't begin until the mid-1990s, so we are now in the epidemic," says Keith, president of the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth in Chicago.
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Overall, experts say, one-third of the increase in twins is because of a natural tendency toward twin births in older moms and the other two-thirds to fertility treatments.
New York City is experiencing a big increase in twins births.
In 1995, there were 3,707 twin births in all the boroughs; in 2003, there were 4,153; and in 2004, there were 4,655. Triplet births have also risen, from 60 in 1995, to 299 in 2004.
Some day the norm will be to look down on natural procreation with no genetic enhancement, no IVF and PIGD, and no genetic screening of sperm. Natural procreation will be seen by the majority of Western countries as irresponsible toward offspring. How far off is that day? 30 years?