'Designer Babies': The Ultimate Privileged Elite?
By Heather Long,
Guardian
| 07. 09. 2013
When the world looks back at how the "designer babies" trend began, they will see an innocent start.
A Philadelphia couple who had gone through the physical and emotional marathon of trying to have a child turned to intra-uterine insemination and ultimately IVF. Like any rational people, they wanted to do everything to increase their chances that IVF would work. In this case, they sent the embryos to an Oxford lab, which ran a kind of
minimal DNA test to see which embryos would be most likely to take.
It's hard to deny this Philadelphia couple the chance to be parents. David Levy and Marybeth Scheidts look very wholesome in their family photo holding their son Connor, born in May 2013. They clearly weren't trying to select the embryo with their preferred hair or eye color or other physical or mental traits. In fact, they didn't even have a full DNA analysis done, only a scan of the chromosomes, the structures that hold genes. This isn't Brave New World-esque test tube babies. It's a traditional family – with the best...
Related Articles
By Laura Hughes, Financial Times | 05.20.2026
Sophie and her husband are set to spend more than £100,000 in travel and medical bills as they fly between England and the US in their bid to have another child.
The couple are undergoing IVF treatment in New York...
By Gina Kolata, The New York Times | 05.25.2026
In a small, preliminary study, an experimental gene-editing treatment dramatically lowered cholesterol levels, perhaps permanently, after just one infusion, scientists reported on Monday.
If confirmed in larger studies, researchers hope the findings may lead to a one-and-done way to prevent...
By Nanette Elster, Kayhan Parsi, and Art Caplan, The American Journal of Bioethics | 05.06.2026
“Better babies.” “Fitter families.” “Survival of the fittest.” “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” These phrases are not merely historical reminders of the United States’ regrettable eugenic past but are appearing in an increasingly eugenic present. Eugenics may have seemed...
By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.06.2026
Justin Schleede reaches onto a black lab bench to pick up a tray of small plastic tubes.
"These are saliva samples as well as blood," says Schleede, a geneticist who runs Herasight Inc.'s lab in Morrisville, N.C. "We also...