BBC - Science & Nature - Horizon - Designer Babies

BBC - Science & Nature - Horizon - Designer Babies: "Life and Death in the 21st Century:
Designer Babies
BBC2 8:00pm Thursday 6th January 2000

Designer Babies? NARRATOR (DILLY BARLOW): In the 21st-century genetics will dominate our food, our health, our environment. Now scientists are beginning to talk about the final taboo: hand picking the genes of our children. Ordering up designer children has long been the subject of science-fiction, but can it, and should it, ever become reality?

PROF. GREG STOCK (UCLA School of Medicine): In the future we are going to be entirely transformed. Humans are now becoming objects of conscious design.

DR. TOM MURRAY (The Hastings Center of Bioethics): The power to genetically manipulate our offspring will challenge us in ways that I’m not sure many technologies in the history of humankind have challenged us.

DR. DEAN HAMER (National Cancer Institute): How much is it going to cost to make a designed baby? Do you want retail or wholesale? I don’t know, $20,000 or 30,000, something like that, so this is not cheap.

PROF. LEE SILVER (Geneticist, Princeton University): Designer babies actually cause a future that is much more horrible than anything that Huxley could have imagined in his book Brave New World because it’s going to increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots."