COVER STORY: SEPTEMBER 13, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 10

If We Have It, Do We Use It?
Science careers forward, and ethics tries to catch up. Both impose choices that can change our lives
By NANCY GIBBS

We've seen these visions glinting in the distance for some time--the prospect that one day parents will be able to browse through gene catalogs to special-order a hazel-eyed, redheaded extrovert with perfect pitch. Leave aside for the moment whether scientists actually found an "IQ gene" last week or the argument over what really constitutes intelligence. Every new discovery gives shape and bracing focus to a debate we have barely begun. Even skeptics admit it's only a matter of time before these issues become real. If you could make your kids smarter, would you? If everyone else did, would it be fair not to?

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It's an ethical quandary and an economic one, about fairness and fate, about vanity and values. Which side effects would we tolerate? What if making kids smarter also made them meaner? What if only the rich could afford the advantage? Does God give us both the power to re-create ourselves and the moral muscles to resist? "The time to talk about it in schools and churches and magazines and debate societies is now," says bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania. "If you wait, five years from now the gene doctor will be hanging out the MAKE A SMARTER BABY sign down the street."

Self-improvement has forever been an American religion, but the norms about what is normal keep changing. Many parents don't think twice about straightening their kids' crooked teeth but stop short of fixing a crooked nose, and yet, in just the past seven years, plastic surgery performed on teens has doubled. As for intellectual advantages, parents soak their babies in Mozart with dubious effect, put a toy computer in the crib, elbow their way into the best preschools to speed them on their path to Harvard. Infertile couples advertise for an egg donor in the Yale Daily News, while entrepreneurs sold the sperm of Nobel laureates.

"What, if anything, is the difference between getting one's child a better school and getting one's child a better gene?" asks Erik Parens of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. "I think the answer has to do with the difference between cultivating and purchasing capacities." Buying a Harvard education may enhance a child's natural gifts, he argues, but it's not the same as buying the gifts.

Every novel, every movie that updates Frankenstein provides a cautionary tale: these experiments may not turn out as we expect. Genetic engineering is more permanent than a pill or a summer-school class. Parents would be making decisions over which their children had no control and whose long-term impact would be uncertain. "Human organisms are not things you hang ornaments on like a Christmas tree," says Thomas Murray, Hastings' director. "If you make a change in one area, it may cause very subtle changes in some other area. Will there be an imbalance that the scientists are not looking for, not testing for, and might not even show up in mice?"

What if it turned out that by enhancing intellectual ability, some other personality trait changed as well? "Everything comes at a price," argues UCLA neurobiologist Alcino Silva. "Very often when there's a genetic change where we improve something, something else gets hit by it, so it's never a clean thing." The alarmists, like longtime biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, go further. "How do you know you're not going to create a mental monster?" he asks. "We may be on the road to programming our own extinction."

The broader concern is one of fairness. Will such enhancement be available to everyone or only to those who can afford it? "Every parent in the world is going to want this," says Rifkin. "But who will have access to it? It will create a new form of discrimination. How will we look at those who are not enhanced, the child with the low IQ?" Who would have the right to know whether your smarts were natural or turbo-charged? How would it affect whom we choose to marry--those with altered genes or those without? If, as a parent, you haven't mortgaged the house to enhance your children, what sort of parent does that make you? Will a child one day be able to sue her parents for failing to do everything they could for her?

But just for the sake of argument, suppose raising IQ didn't require any permanent, expensive genetic engineering at all. Scientists are studying brain-boosting compounds. Suppose they found something as cheap and easy as aspirin; one pill and you wake up the next morning a little bit brighter. Who could argue with that?

Some people are worried about the trend toward making people more alike--taller, thinner, smarter. Maybe it's best for society as a whole to include those with a range of needs and talents and predispositions, warts and all. "As someone who morally values diversity," says ethicist Elizabeth Bounds of Emory University's Candler School of Theology, "I find this frightening. We run the risk of shaping a much more homogeneous community around certain dominant values, a far more engineered community." What sort of lottery would decide who is to leap ahead, who is to be held back for an overall balance? At the moment, nature orchestrates our diversity. But human nature resists leaving so much to chance, if there is actually a choice.

The debate raises an even more basic question: Why would we want to enhance memory in the first place? We may imagine that it would make us happier, except that we all know smart, sad people; or richer, except that there are wildly successful people who can't remember their phone number. Perhaps it would help us get better grades, land a better job, but it might also take us down a road we'd prefer not to travel. "You might say yes, it would be wonderful if we could all have better memories," muses Stanford University neuropsychiatrist Dr. Robert Malenka. "But there's a great adaptive value to being able to forget things. If your memory improves too much, you might not be a happier person. I'm thinking of rape victims and soldiers coming back from war. There's a reason the brain has evolved to forget certain things."

In the end it is the scientists who both offer the vision and raise the alarms. People with exceptional, photographic memories, they note, sometimes complain of mental overload. "Such people," says University of Iowa neurologist Dr. Antonio Damasio, "have enormous difficulty making decisions, because every time they can think of 20 different options to choose from." There is luxury and peace in forgetting, sometimes; it literally clears the mind, allows us to focus on the general rather than the specific and immediate evidence in front of us. Maybe it even makes room for reflection on questions like when better is not necessarily good.

Reported by David Bjerklie and Emily Mitchell/New York, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dick Thompson/Washington