Designer Babies Are No Longer Theoretical. What Could Go Wrong?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.

Imagine that you are about to start a family. Would you want the ability to choose whether your child would have cystic fibrosis or not? Would you want to be able to choose if that first child would be a boy or a girl? Would you want to choose her height? Her hair color? Her risk for diabetes?

These questions have been around since the first bioethicist held court in a university classroom, but only now has technology advanced to the point where we need to consider the practical implications of answering them.

This week, in a New England Journal of Medicine special report, Daniel Benjamin and his team highlight how the use of polygenic risk scores in in vitro fertilization might lead to a literal Brave New World situation.

This isn't theoretical, by the way. Right now, there are multiple companies out there that will perform genetic sequencing on IVF embryos and give parents a prediction of the likelihood of all sorts of diseases. This is from the public brochure of a company called