- In the future, it could be possible to have dozens,
or even hundreds of embryos to choose from.
And when people hear about this
they often think about "Gattaca."
Which I like to say,
"Gattaca" is a movie about a world
that's much better for most people
except for one guy.
I'm Diana, and my heretical view is
that most people don't understand what eugenics is,
and if they did,
they would find that they agreed with much of it.
- [Narrator] Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like.
But, what if they're right?
- So eugenics in the larger, public conversation
has come to mean 'anything that has to do
with racism or genes or Nazis or biology that I don't like.'
If you look at the actual definition
of eugenics as bioethicists use it,
it's any principle or individual choice
that's intended to increase
desirable, genetic characteristics in the next generation,
or decrease undesirable characteristics
to improve the next generation.
Things like Lee Kuan Yew,
the prime minister of Singapore,
holding cruises to introduce college-educated men and women
in the hopes that they would have children
who'd be more likely to be intelligent
and pave the way for the future of Singapore.
And of course,
people had widely variant ideas
about what desirable and undesirable means.
But, if you think that health, attractiveness, longevity,
intelligence are desirable characteristics, which,
I think that we do,
then it should be fairly uncontroversial
that we want to increase the prevalence
of desirable characteristics in the next generation
as long as we don't use violence or coercion.
Now, another thing that's fairly uncontroversial
is choosing who you have children with.
In some way you're saying, "I wanna make more copies
of you for the future."
If you look at Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, right?
He's the son of a wrestler who found the daughter
of a wrestler in Samoa to have a baby with
'cause I think he wanted to make sure
that his son was also good at wrestling
or gonna be very athletic.
So, you can see specialization.
People actualizing their specific, interesting phenotype
in their mate choice.
And I don't think that that's gonna be undermined at all
with things like polygenic screening or embryo screening.
I think it's just gonna increase the quality
of the variety that we see
rather than undermining the variety entirely.
As I'm pregnant now,
I've discovered that a lot of prenatal care
is really intrinsically eugenic in its aims.
In the first 12 weeks or so,
what you're trying to decide is: 'Am I gonna keep this baby
if there's something seriously wrong with him or her?'
If I could feed my child something when they were young
that would give them a 20% decreased cancer risk,
or if I could read them some book
that would increase their IQ,
I think everybody would be in favor of it.
I see mothers do incredibly neurotic things
that have, really, very little evidence and support of them,
in the small hope that it will improve their child's life,
and their child's well-being
and their child's success in life.
So, I don't think it's much of a stretch
to say that reproductive technology
is gonna enable those beautiful sentiments
to have the best possible life for your child
even more.
I think there's a variety of assumptions that people have
about reproductive technology that are unfounded.
There's something called 'expressivist objection,'
which is where disability scholars say,
"Look if you're saying that this is undesirable,
you're saying that you prefer
that people like me don't exist."
But it's not used as an objection against, for example,
not drinking alcohol when you're pregnant-
I could very easily imagine somebody
with fetal alcohol syndrome saying,
"You're always encouraging pregnant women
not to drink when they're pregnant.
Are you saying it would be better
for people like me not to exist?"
It's important that we have care and compassion,
and that we make allowances for people
with various kinds of disabilities.
But it doesn't necessarily follow from that,
that if we reduce the number of people with disabilities
that our care and concern for those people
are going to decrease over time,
or that we are going to become less compassionate
for such people.
Futurists and transhumanists have been talking
for some time about changing the character
of future generations.
Through technology, innovation, education,
and just giving people the kinds
of incentives that would help them along.
If we are in favor of, for example,
giving people with depression anti-depressants
or medicating people who have psychiatric ailments
to decrease their suffering,
I don't think that choosing future people
through embryo selection is that much different.
So I think that a lot of well-meaning, kind, conscientious,
ethical people are considering what kinds of children
they're gonna bring into the world-
and what's the best possible life
that they can give to a child
both by choosing a child
who has certain genetic characteristics
and by giving them the best possible life that they can
through environmental interventions.
My husband is a somewhat controversial figure.
It was like,
"I wanna make as many copies of Geoffrey as possible,
'cause I love him,
and I'm gonna use my own body as a photocopier."
(laughing)