Optimizing Ourselves to Death

On designer babies in the age of Prometheus

There are two philosophies of how to handle public figures with appalling ideas: 1) Ignore them, or 2) Let them speak, then ask them a series of uncomfortable questions. Lately, Ross Douthat has been practicing the latter approach with his new podcast Interesting Times. The results have been intriguing, if terrifying.

Douthat’s latest guest is Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid, a cutting-edge whole-genome sequencing technology offering parents the chance to…well, as one happy couple puts it in their review, “make informed choices” about their offspring. “Have healthy babies” is the welcome message that types itself out when you visit the site, followed by “Whole genome embryo reports.” For a price ($12,500 at the moment), you can send a batch of embryos through the screening process, receive a comprehensive report on nearly 100% of each child’s genetic code, and proceed to, quite literally, swipe right on your own children.

A measure of genetic screening has always been available to parents, but Orchid can now predict all sorts of health risks you might be worrying about, along with numerous others that might not even have occurred to you. Hereditary cancer, diabetes, heart defects, inflammatory bowel disease, the list goes on. It will of course identify Down’s syndrome, but it can also predict various other neurodevelopmental disorders, autism disorders, and such. “For the first time,” writes Dr. Nathan Slotnick, embryos at risk of such developmental handicaps are “identifiable and avoidable.”

The project is personal for Siddiqui, whose mother suffered from a congenital condition that struck her with early blindness. Douthat finds a moment in their conversation to point out the obvious: Had this tech been available in her mother’s generation, it could have “deleted” her mother. The point seemed lost, like other points Douthat attempted to make throughout, whether trying to awaken some sense of the embryos’ moral value or some sense of what would be lost in a world where the connection between lovemaking and procreation is entirely severed.

Towards the end, he shows a rare flash of deep emotion as he quotes from Galway Kinnell’s remarkable poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” in which a couple’s young son chooses a less than opportune moment to barge into the bedroom. As the little boy plops himself between them, the couple share a smile and touch each other across the child’s small body, “this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making.” After composing himself, Douthat asks his guest, “Do you worry about removing or diminishing from human experience that aspect of being a husband and a wife, in a relationship with a child?” She tilts her head and smiles back at him blankly. “What do you mean?”

In the hard sci-fi film Gattaca, set in “the not too distant future,” children conceived in the act of love are called “faith children,” or sometimes “God’s children.” The protagonist, Vincent, is such a child. But he has grown up in the shadow of his father’s unspoken regret for the spontaneous lovemaking act that made him, a baby with a heart condition that gave him a life expectancy of only 30 years. Roger Ebert reflected, in his prescient review,

When parents can order “perfect” babies, will they? Would you take your chances on a throw of the genetic dice, or order up the make and model you wanted? How many people are prepared to buy a car at random from the universe of all available cars? That’s how many, I suspect, would opt to have natural children.

And indeed, as one can already hear in Siddiqui’s rhetoric, the social pressure will take on a tone of moral pressure: If you could ensure that your child had lower risk of X, Y and Z conditions, surely you should. How, she demands to know, could any good parent “spend hours researching skincare or where to eat lunch, but shrug at leaving our own child’s potential *lifetime of suffering* to chance”?

The dystopian horror of a future where “defective” embryos are targeted for destruction should be obvious, though to many it is evidently not. Siddiqui retweeted someone saying he can’t understand the outrage over intentional embryo sorting, when the very process of IVF (as most commonly practiced) guarantees not all embryos once created can be implanted. If people are unbothered by the fact that embryos in general are discarded all the time, whence the squeamishness at the proposal to focus on some embryos in particular? He does have a point. Perhaps the simple answer is that people are unbothered about the inevitable consequence of IVF precisely to the extent that they don’t think about it. Bringing specific embryos into focus, with their specific little genomes and the specific sorts of illnesses they might suffer with, if they were ever born to grow and die, makes this impossible. It names the truth that was always lurking, always waiting to be named.

Gattaca isn’t a story about discarded embryos. It avoids confronting that particular truth head-on, partly by creating a storyworld where, through sophisticated gene editing, “potentially prejudicial conditions” can be “eradicated” in the literal sense (not the perniciously euphemistic sense) before implantation. Yet there’s still supposed to be something sinister about the whole “shopping” process. A toothy-smiley lab scientist informs Vincent’s parents that he’s “taken the liberty” of making sure their next child has a reduced chance of things like premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism, propensity for violence, obesity… Here they stop him and ask whether it’s possible that a few things could be left to chance. The man in the white coat insists, “We want to give your child the best possible start. We have enough imperfection built in. Your child doesn’t need any additional burdens.” “Keep in mind,” he adds, “This child is still you. Simply the best of you.” Tiny Vincent plays with a toy on the floor, blissfully oblivious.

Even in a world where embryos are “fixable,” Gattaca subtly argues that the sin behind the sin of embryo disposal remains unexpiated: the sin of playing God. And in that world, it is not only the imperfect ones, the “degene-erates,” who pay the price. It is the perfect ones also.

(Note: Spoilers to follow.)

Vincent’s myopia and heart weakness make him an unfit candidate to fulfil his lifelong dream of space travel (with good reason, which rather deflates the sense of uplift we’re supposed to feel about his dogged perseverance). However, in a society where genes are everything, the “valids” meticulously segregated from “invalids,” medical exams have been eschewed for quick, non-invasive DNA tests. Vincent’s defects aren’t readily visible. Money for contact lenses could discreetly fix his myopia. Now if he could only not be himself, the world would open up to him. In the midst of his despair, a broker emerges from the shadows like a dark genie to grant his wish.

The man whose DNA Vincent will purchase is Jerome Morrow, a bitter, reclusive young Englishman who is genetically perfect in every way. “You could go anywhere with this guy’s helix tucked under your arm,” the broker whispers as they walk into his apartment, reeling off his specs with pimp-like relish: “He’s practically gonna live forever. His IQ is off the register. Better than 20/20 vision in both eyes. The heart of an ox. He could run through a wall…if he could run.” Here Jerome makes his entry, in a wheelchair.

Vincent’s eyes follow the staircase winding its way up through the place like a double helix: “Who lives up there?” “Well I certainly don’t,” says Jerome, and takes a pull on his cigarette.

Played to acerbic posh perfection by a young Jude Law, Jerome is the sort of doomed English character who could have stepped out of the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel, or a Great War drama. His elegant brattiness conceals a secret wound, which only slips out in a drunk confession midway through the film: His paralysis was no “accident.” It was a botched suicide attempt, after he took mere silver in a swimming competition. The weight of failure was too much to bear. He was Jerome Morrow. Jerome Morrow was never meant to be a step down on the podium.

As for the parents who engineered this perfectly doomed son, we never meet them. They are invisible. Whether they cast him off or he cast them off after the “accident” is never explained.

How exactly Jerome (or “Eugene,” the unsubtly supplied middle name by which he prefers to be called) has been making a living is also left mysterious—a squandered inheritance, perhaps, after the Victorian fashion. But Vincent starts paying the rent after using Jerome’s artfully stored body matter to land his dream job at the titular Gattaca corporation. As for his own cursed loose skin, hair, nails, etc., he sloughs off as much as he can into an incinerator, big enough for a man to fit inside, then climbs back out and sets it on fire.

Jerome has no friends, but Vincent becomes a friend, of a sort. He worries about what Jerome will do all year back on earth while Vincent is in space. “I have my books,” Jerome shrugs. “I can go places in my head.” “Seriously” though, Vincent wonders, “what are you gonna do?” Jerome picks up his full glass of wine: “I’m gonna finish this.”

Tension enters the plot when one of Vincent’s own eyelashes is left behind at the scene of a murder at Gattaca, and the owner of its “invalid” DNA prejudicially suspected. There follows a mad scramble to dodge the authorities and keep the fraud going, ensuring Vincent is never put in a situation where his own body matter could be sampled. In a central scene, Jerome must “be himself for a day” (which, he reminds Vincent, he “was never very good at”), symbolically army-crawling up his double-helix staircase to answer the door and give the inspector his arm for a surprise venous blood test. (For people like me who worry about plot holes, this appears to be the apartment’s “main entry,” as opposed to what seems like a more secretive entry for the broker to introduce Jerome and Vincent on the ground floor.)

As Jerome rolls up his sleeve, the inspector silently notes the needle scratches around his vein, like the track marks of a junkie.

Through a few more twists and turns, Vincent escapes with his fake identity—and his dream—intact. At their parting, Jerome reveals a fridge full of samples for Vincent to use when he returns—two lifetimes’ worth. “So that Jerome will always be here.” Vincent is puzzled. Jerome explains: “I’m traveling too.” Vincent doesn’t seem to realize what this means, but by now, we can guess.

Really, Jerome says, he got the better end of the deal. “I only lent you my body. You lent me your dream.”

Martin Heidegger, in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” proposes that technology in its essence reduces whatever it touches to “standing reserve.” Forests, rivers, and all natural things are converted to mere resources. The forest becomes fuel. The river becomes hydroelectric power. So it is, or so it can potentially be, with human beings. So it is with Jerome. Soon, Jerome will be destroyed, his half-living body burnt to ashes. But “Jerome will always be here” — Jerome on tap, Jerome in reserve.

In this way, Gattaca is a film in tension with itself. On one hand, we are meant to root for plucky, striving Vincent and his impossible dream. On the other, we detect something unsavory about the broker’s “arrangement,” something fundamentally demeaning—if you will, desacralizing—in the way Jerome’s body has been reduced to mere means for Vincent’s starry Hollywood end.

The philosopher Michael Sandel somewhat anticipates tragedies like Jerome’s in his long essay “The Case Against Perfection,” which also tries to sidestep the question of embryos’ moral status. His moral argument against “designer babies” rests on the fundamental goodness of seeing life as given rather than selected. He is much struck by the concept of “openness to the unbidden” — a phrase which, notably, he has taken from a Catholic theologian. He’s not opposed in principle to an intervention that could spare a child from disease. But when a child is engineered, designed, sculpted towards anticipated “perfection,” then the parent-child relationship is fundamentally warped. In losing the blessing of surprise, we will lose the blessing of humility. Our sense of wonder will die.

There is something appealing, even intoxicating, about a vision of human freedom unfettered by the given. It may even be the case that the allure of that vision played a part in summoning the genomic age into being. It is often assumed that the powers of enhancement we now possess arose as an inadvertent by-product of biomedical progress—the genetic revolution came, so to speak, to cure disease, and stayed to tempt us with the prospect of enhancing our performance, designing our children, and perfecting our nature. That may have the story backwards. It is more plausible to view genetic engineering as the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But that promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.

This week I was “tag-teaming” on Twitter with a young philosopher who shares most of my conclusions about the brave new world Noor Siddiqui wants to usher in. It was she who recommended this essay by Sandel. But I realized that, like him, she also wants to make an argument that swings free of phrases like “sanctity of life,” or the straightforward view that discarding embryos is murder. It’s the boutique shopping, Promethean hubris of it all that really horrifies her, whether you want to think of embryos as people or not.

I propose that her horror is good and healthy, but that nature is so constituted as to make that horror concrete. You can’t rub your hand against the grain and not get splinters. You can’t play with Promethean fire and not be burned. Or, more to the point, you can’t play with such fire and someone not be burned.

For someone must burn. Someone must bleed. Someone must pay. Someone always pays.