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Julian Savulescu on Designer Babies (originally on Bioethics Bites)

Philosophy Bites

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The Effects of Impulsion Control on Designer Babies

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 thalassemia but increasingly it's been used for milder conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. In principle you could test for any genes that the embryo or fetus has and this opens the door to testing what kind of child you're likely to have. But there seems to be something quite different from screening out embryos which have a propensity to illness or disease from actively selecting particular attractive features of the child to be.

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