Let the DNA Dice Fall Where They May

Consider this: Earth, 2045. Two prospective parents visit the doctor's office to design their child. Over the course of the consultation, they hit all the regular bases - basic genefixes to increase the chances of a healthy life, removing any chance of astigmatism developing (the father, and his father, still wear glasses, and laser eye surgery doesn't do squat to DNA), so on and so forth. Then one of them, in a covert moment, takes the doctor aside and whispers, "please make sure my baby won't be gay."

It absolutely will happen. Not only because human nature is maddeningly predictable, but because a shadow of this is going on right now. There's a bit of explanation involved.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia ("CAH") is an adrenal gland disorder which can inhibit the development of primary and secondary sexual characteristics due to a lack of sex steroids, of which testosterone and estrogen are probably the most well known - and they also sound like the sort of thing that would be illegal at some kind of Sexual Olympics. Recently Dr. Maria New at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center has been attempting to cure cases of CAH in utero through the administration of dexamethasone, a drug that has never been definitively tested on humans and which has caused birth defects in animal studies. You'd think that prescribing an experimental drug to pregnant women would be the height of this problem, but it goes deeper.

Back in 1999, H.F.L. Meyer-Bahlburg - apparently a colleague of Dr. New, though I've only found one website that states this, so this may be the internet echo chamber at work - wrote an article for The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism about CAH - specifically, one investigating why women affected with CAH have "relatively low fertility rates." From the article, it seems that CAH women "tend to have delayed (or absent) heterosexual milestones," tend not to be in relationships or marriages, have limited libidos, and "have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role." My god.

Oh, right! They also tend to have "an increased rate of bi- or homosexuality." But don't worry! Administration of dexamethasone can fix all of this, assuming it doesn't also cause birth defects! Granted, these doctors aren't yet at the point - so far as I know - where they're administering the drug out of a desire to "normalize" outliers.

This is just one of the first whispers before the roar, to make sure we're paying attention. Once the future really hits, once genetic engineering technologies progress to a point where parents can specify the qualities of their child, it's going to get a whole lot more challenging to not be swept away with the tide.

Men and women carry the rainbow flag along Bloor Street East in the Toronto Pride Parade - July 4, 2010

It has taken centuries, millennia even, for homosexuals to even begin to climb out of the pits of discrimination they've faced in societies throughout the Western world, and outside the West the laws aimed at them are nothing short of barbaric. If governments such as Saudi Arabia or Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death, had the technology to prevent babies from being born homosexual, they would use it. No question. Even in the enlightened West - particularly in the United States, considering the furor over the issue of same-sex marriage there - there are plenty of people who would take that option if given the chance.

I don't think they should be given that chance. I do not believe parental authority goes that far. To me, merely tolerating this notion would permit the rise of the idea that "deviance is a genetic disorder," something to be corrected so that everyone falls within the society's social norms, regardless of how outdated they may be. My notion is that the opposite of diversity is stagnation, and a society that seeks to make its next generation "normal" according to its own views is not only betraying that generation, but betraying itself.

I mean, how far does this go? Should all "socially unpopular" qualities be eradicated in utero? If there's a particular gene that predisposes its carriers to atheism, should that also be corrected? Considering that there seems to be a rather close correspondence between nations that hate homosexuals and those that hate atheists...

We need to do what we can to solve this problem before it gets too complicated to handle. My own belief is that governments need to enact what I'll call Dice Laws - a legal framework for what parents or states are not permitted to specify when designing a child. Sure, you can ask for them to be intelligent, athletic, or have long fingers suitable for playing the piano, but the direction the child ends up looking for tender companionship is not up to you. Nor should it be.

The stuff of life is not a place where we should pretend control. Not when human nature suggests people would use that control for their own interests, not those of the life they're controlling.

A Predisposition to Consider

Given that one of my favored protagonists for the stories I write is genetically engineered, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to people who are familiar with what I've written so far that I think genetic technologies are going to be one of the defining factors of the twenty-first century. We will, most likely, see humans getting their genomes tweaked, both to correct flaws and to improve from the baseline. We will probably see genetic modification going far beyond food crops, regardless of how much the European Union wails, to the extent that I would be surprised if the next few decades do not see the creation of engineered plant strains tweaked to, say, increase their carbon dioxide intake.

If that's the case, though, there are real cultural issues that are going to have to be dealt with as genetic engineering technologies move into the fore - and these are issues beyond the basic "playing God/Frankenstein" ones that tend to dominate the debate today. It's a safe assumption, I think, that in the next few decades those concerns will have been put to rest, and that future generations will be more comfortable with genetic engineering than we are. So what do they have to worry about?

Taking responsibility for genetic predispositions, perhaps. In the article "Cyber trails make it harder for politicians to escape scandal," the Toronto Star's reporter Olivia Ward took note of research which indicates a specific gene - RS3 334, to be specific - has an effect on pair bonding, to the extent that men with "two copies of the gene had more turbulent marriages and more likelihood of divorce." As geneticists continue to unwrap the human genetic code, it's certain that this sort of discovery will not be a one-time event.

What disturbs me is the prospect is that people will use this as an excuse to avoid having to take responsibility for their own actions. "Oh, it's not my fault I'm an alcoholic," John Smith of 2050 may say as he reaches for the next bottle. "I've just got bad genes." I'm absolutely certain that this is going to happen. Too many people today are already servants of their baser instincts, whether they realize it or not; widespread knowledge of these genetic predispositions will only encourage them.

Genetic predispositions are exactly that: predispositions. All other things being equal, someone with gene X is more likely to undertake action Y than someone who lacks gene X. Humans are more than just chemical machines, moving this way and that because our genes echo in our ears. The real mark of a person is to be able to climb above that, to have the willpower and the intellectual strength to recognize these actions and choose. There's no value in being swept along with the tide. We need to learn to ignore the primal voices that resound in our minds, to use our minds to evaluate and understand. We must do the impossible so that we will be mighty.

All Hail the Almighty Tallest

Maybe one day you'll meet Taryn Tianxia Liang. She's the protagonist of one of the stories I'm currently developing and hopefully more down the road, one of the investigators and defenders of the half-familiar Earth of 2078, and the product of the TwenOneCen's "finest" genetic engineering. It's why she's so tall - 6'3", 190.5 centimeters. Perhaps not quite enough to become a basketball star, but sufficient to intimidate and stand above a crowd. The background, in-story reason was that her parents believed it would give her social advantages.

It seems as if I've managed to wander down the right track. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on a growing interest among South Korean parents to ensure their children grow up to be as tall as possible, since apparently the idea in vogue there right now is that "height is crucial to success." Anything that might grant an extra inch or two is being tried - acupuncture, exercise, growth hormones - and an industry of growth clinics has sprung up to feed the demand, regardless of whether or not the solutions they sell will live up to the hype. It's fortunate no one seems to have resorted to borrowing Procrustes' bigger bed.

Whatever it is, I don't think it's some passing fancy. Height is a primal thing in the human psyche, signifiying strength and authority, and it's something people strive for. I mean, look at elevator shoes. Other than making the fashion statement "I am taller than you and therefore better," what possible reason could there be for these to exist? For a great many people, artificial aids are their only option to stand above the competition. For their children, though, the game is different.

So far, genetic engineering hasn't exactly been the runaway technological success that some people suspected - take seaQuest DSV, which in another instance of having the future come too soon postulated a "Dark Age of Genetics" from 2001 to 2003, or the genetically engineered superman Khan Noonien Singh, who came to rule a quarter of Earth in 1992 in the Star Trek universe background. Nevertheless, progress has been made since the turn of the millennium, most notably with the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. It's possible now to sequence an individual's genome. Though I personally doubt it'll lead to a situation like that in Repo! The Genetic Opera, I feel genetic technology is going to deeply influence the shape of the twenty-first century.

Probably its height as well.

I can see a way it could conceivably go. Where today we have chains of growth clinics that claim to add inches via conventional medical procedures, in the future we may deal with operations run by hack genehackers who, for enough yuan or euros or rupees, can promise parents that their children, born or otherwise, will grow tall and strapping like a mighty tree. What they may not do, on the other hand, is bother to improve their patients' hearts or lungs or general musculature enough to support the extra inches that will get piled on - after all, that's complicated and expensive. Tried-and-true genetic engineering will be the province of the wealthy and powerful for a long time - but the promise of tweaked genes will undoubtedly be enough for some parents, eager to give their children a leg up by any means necessary, to open their wallets and genomes.

Maybe basketball will become more popular, too.