Stem cell biology may revolutionise reproduction
by James Cook, MercatorNet:
Last year a Stanford law professor, Hank Greely, published a book, The End of Sex And The Future of Human Reproduction. In it he predicted that in 20 to 40 years’ time people would no longer have sex to make babies. Sex will be largely recreational and procreation will be subcontracted to IVF clinics to create designer babies.
Greely was not setting the scene for a dystopian science fiction novel but extrapolating from current trends in genetic testing and stem cell biology. It will soon be possible to sequence the entire genome of an embryo quickly and cheaply. This could allow companies to offer parents genetic dossiers on 100 of their own embryos. They will be able to flip through them to find their ideal child – a sportsman, a poet, a beauty queen, etc. The chosen one would be implanted and the others would probably be destroyed. It would be a kind of commercial eugenics.
However, to achieve this, huge quantities of human egg cells will be needed. At the moment, these are removed from women’s ovaries in IVF clinics and so they are in short supply. But sometime in the not-too-distant future, a stem cell biology will make it possible to grow an “inexhaustible supply” of eggs and sperm from skin cells.
This technology has already been successfully tested on mice.
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