Tomorrow that may mean genetic manipulation to bring about a higher IQ, a few added inches of height, a special talent, a pleasing personality or face. The right genes, experts predict, will be available at a price, making a marketable product out of the raw material of human life. Already, reproductive clinics advertise online for egg donors, and some female college students pay tuition by selling their eggs, despite warnings of risks to their own health. Surprisingly, except for a spate of articles when the news of Dolly, the sheep cloned in Scotland, became public, discussion of work underway in biotechnology is sparse. It is an experiment, he warns, fraught with risks, pitfalls and dangers.
Ethicists are deeply concerned, too, about privacy and justice.
Long before related theological, ethical and legal issues have been resolved, science and its handmaid, business, forge ahead, patenting and experimenting with genetic procedures. Given the rapid progress of biotechnology in recent years, the government's tolerant stance and the vast implications for the future of humankind, the poverty of the discussion is remarkable. Sparse regulation of reproductive technologies in the United States has left the arena open for abuses, prompting some doctors, lawyers, scientists and ethicists to complain. In July 1998, a group from the Illinois Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Science , recommended that the federal government adopt regulatory measures. The group noted that reproductive technologies are subject to more legal restrictions in other parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, than they are in the United States.