2012-04-02
21 分钟This is bioethics bytes with me, David.
Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.
Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Oxford's Uhiro Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by grant from the Wellcome Trust.
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The term designer baby is usually used in a pejorative sense to conjure up some dystopian brave new world.
There are already ways to affect what kind of children you have, most obviously by choosing the partner you have them with.
But there are others, too.
A pregnant mother can improve her baby's prospects by eating nutritious food in pregnancy, for instance, and avoiding smoking or drinking alcohol.
With advances in genetics, however, there will soon be radical new methods to select or influence the characteristics of your progeny.
Not just physical characteristics like height or eye color, but intellectual capacities and capacities linked to morality, such as how empathetic the child will be.
The big question is how much freedom parents should have to make such selections.
Julian Savulescu of Oxford's Uhiro center for Practical Ethics believes that if we can genetically alter the next generation, not only should we be free to do so, it may even turn out then in some circumstances, we have an obligation to go ahead and do it.
Julian Savlescu, welcome to Bioethics Bites.
Good afternoon, Nigel.
We're going to focus on the topic of designer babies.
Now.
Could you just begin by saying a little bit about what is possible?
So today we can use various technologies, either of testing the fetus or of embryos to look at the genetic constitution.
This is typically done to detect major genetic disorders like down syndrome, cystic fibrosis or thalassaemia.