from Scientific American magazine, June 2003.

note: what follows is the opening section of a 6-page article 

Pandora's Baby

By Robin Marantz Henig

          At the end of July, a very special young woman will turn 25.  She might not seem all that special today – just another nursery school aide in the north of England, a quiet, shy blonde who enjoys an occasional round of darts at the neighborhood pub.  But when she was born on July 25, 1978, newspapers around the world touted her as the “baby of the century.”  Her name is Louise Brown, and she was the world’s first test tube baby.

          People usually remember Louise Brown’s name, and the fact that she was British, and that her doctors’ names, Steptoe and Edwards, sounded like an old-fashioned vaudeville team.  But what they don’t usually recall is one of the most important facts of her arrival: that in prospect, people were horrified by it.  Even those who supported scientific experimentation believed, as the days ticked down to the birth, that Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards might have brewed a monster in their petri dish.  Would the child be normal, people wondered, or would the laboratory manipulations leave their mark in some dreadful genetic derangement?  Would it be a freak, either chromosomally or psychologically?  Would it be able to bear the knowledge of how different it was, how bizarrely it had been created?  And, scariest of all, would it be the first member of an alien army of laboratory-bred automatons, a race of not-quite-humans who would eventually be created specifically as a means to somebody’s nefarious ends?

          Such speculations seem crazy today, now that in vitro fertilization (IVF) has led to the birth of one million babies around the world, most of them perfectly healthy.  But change the subject from “IVF” to “cloning,” and these questions don’t seem so crazy after all.  The same concerns raised in the 1970s about in vitro fertilization are being raised today, almost verbatim, about such new reproductive options as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, germline gene therapy, genetic enhancement, and human cloning.  Will these new techniques go the way of IVF – morphing, almost without our noticing it, from the monstrous to the mundane?  And if cloning and gene swapping do someday become as commonplace as test tube baby-making, is that something to be feared – or embraced?

          One of the chief IVF opponents in the 1970s was Leon Kass, a biologist at the University of Chicago who took a professional interest in the emerging field of bioethics.  If society allowed IVF to proceed, he wrote shortly after Louise Brown’s birth, some enormous concepts were at stake: “the idea of the humanness of our human life and the meaning of our embodiment, our sexual being, and our relation to ancestors and descendants.”

          Today, Kass uses much the same vocabulary to express his fears about cloning.  Cloning “threatens the dignity of human procreation, giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next,” he wrote earlier this year in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.  “It is the first step toward a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of will.”  Such commentary coming from Kass is particularly powerful because of his unique position in the annals of assisted reproduction.  Not only has he been, for the past 30 years, one of the leading critics of every form of reproductive technology, but he now has a direct line to the White House.  For the past two years, he has been the head of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, whose first task it was to offer advice on how to regulate human cloning.

          Kass was not alone in the 1970s in painting scary scenarios of what might happen if IVF were allowed.  Even James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA and one of the most famous scientists in America, was critical of IVF in its early days.  In 1971, Watson waged a year-long campaign against reproductive technology.  In January he testified before Congress to warn about the advent of human cloning.  In May he published a seminal article in The Atlantic making the same point.    And in July he appeared at a conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation, at which he said that Robert Edwards, the world’s leading IVF researcher, was engaging in a form of “infanticide.”

          “The unexpectedly rapid progress of R. G. Edwards and P. S. Steptoe in working out the conditions for routine test-tube conception of human eggs means that human embryological development need no longer be a process  shrouded in secrecy,” Watson wrote in the Atlantic article.  “It can become instead an event wide-open to a variety of experimental manipulations.”

          Watson wasn’t necessarily judging those manipulations as either good or bad; he just wanted Americans to realize they were imminent, and to start talking about the implications. “Some very hard decisions may soon be upon us,” he wrote. “We must . . . assume that techniques for the in vitro manipulation of human eggs are likely to become general medical practice, capable of routine performance in many major countries, within some ten to twenty years. The situation would then be ripe for extensive efforts, either legal or illegal, at human cloning.”

           But Watson’s predictions from the 70s, like those of others who tried to keep IVF from starting in the first place, turned out to be wrong.   We didn’t experience the disintegration of the nuclear family or the creation of soulless babies that people like Leon Kass said we would.  And so many newer methods of assisted reproduction have been introduced in the past decade that ow that “basic IVF” seems harmless and routine.

          One of the early predictions, however, did turn out to contain more than a kernel of truth.  In the 1970s, critics said that IVF would set us tumbling down a so-called “slippery slope” toward even more objectionable forms of assisted reproductive technology – and that once we opened the floodgates by allowing human eggs to be fertilized in the laboratory, there would be no stopping our descent.  The idea of the “slippery slope” was nothing new even then.  People invoked it when the first artificial insemination was publicized in 1909, conjuring images of selective breeding and a race of illegitimate souls.  Early cases of assisted suicide stimulated talk about a slippery slope toward wholesale killing of the aged or infirm; early attempts at amniocentesis, about a slippery slope toward the elimination of fetuses that were imperfect in some inconsequential way – or that maybe were simply the “wrong” sex. 

          If you look around at all the things that can be done to a developing embryo in 2003, you might think the IVF nay-sayers of the 1970s had a point about how slippery that slope could be.  None of the genetic interventions now being debated – prenatal genetic diagnosis, gene swapping in sex cells or embryos, the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines, cloning – would have been possible had scientists not figured out how to fertilize human eggs in a laboratory dish.

          But does the existence of a slippery slope mean that potentially dangerous sciece should never be done?  Or does it just mean that we as a society eed to watch how certain discoveries evolve, so we can put on the brakes whe it’s time to say “enough”?

          Unlike Kass and some other early IVF critics, James Watson has changed his mind about reproductive technology.  Maybe it’s not so terrible to treat disease through gene therapy, he says now, or to manipulate the genes of eggs and sperm to eradicate disease in subsequent generations, or to insert new and improved genes into embryos for traits that aren’t diseases at all.  “I'm sort of distressed when people say enhancement is bad,” he said last fall, when he appeared at a conference in Toronto to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Gairdner Foundation.  Why shouldn’t parents be allowed, he asked, to improve their child’s intelligence, personality, strength, or looks if genetics makes it possible?  After all, as he put it, “Who wants an ugly baby?"?"?

          Watson’s glib acceptance of such uses of genetics raises important questions about whether we have, almost without noticing it, indeed slid down a slippery slope from which there is no return.  Is the inevitable next step the equally glib acceptance of progressively greater intrusions: animal-human hybrids, embryos for tissue harvesting, human clones?   Many people fear that it is – which explains the current efforts to curtail scientists’ ability to manipulate embryos even before the work really gets started.