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Published Saturday, April 7, 2001, in the Akron Beacon Journal. Genetics wars forming up Practical implications are as frightening as wide-eyed possibilities are promising BY TRACY WHEELER Beacon Journal medical writer Lori Andrews has peeked into the future of human genetics. And what she sees is equal parts frightening and funny. There will be a time, said Andrews -- a professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and author of The Clone Age -- when our genetic makeup becomes common knowledge, open to marketers who might want to fill our mailboxes with junk mail on diets and devices. Or a time when governments will force prenatal genetic testing, hoping to encourage women to abort rather than cause taxpayers and insurers to foot the bill for a sick child. Or a time when a prenatal genetic test can reveal that a child will be colorblind. And when he turns 18, he will sue his parents because this disability, which his parents could have prevented, has kept him from being an artist. (Andrews calls this a ``wrongful life'' suit.) She offered such predictions at yesterday's ``2001: The Human Genome Odyssey Conference: The Science, Business, Law & Ethics of Engineering Human Life'' sponsored by the University of Akron. Andrews didn't stop there, though. Imagine that parents, hoping to avoid a ``wrongful life'' suit, create 12 embryos before pregnancy, testing each embryo's genetic makeup and choosing the best of the bunch. You decide on one, a boy. Except when you give birth to a girl, you figure out that the lab screwed up. So you decide to sue the lab. For what, though? Inferior product? Lost wages, since women earn less over their lifetimes than men? Or, maybe, before you can get to that point, you and your spouse can't decide on which features to choose -- blue eyes or brown, short or tall, blond or brunette. Torn, you divorce. But then what happens to those 12 embryos? Who has custody? ``More and more, children are being turned into commercial products,'' Andrews told the crowd of about 700 doctors, teachers and students. ``Having a baby is becoming like buying a car. You have to decide on what features you want.'' A recent poll found that 42 percent of parents said they would choose to make their children smarter and 43 percent said they would enhance them physically. ``Should a parent be able to buy their child a height gene?'' Andrews asked her audience. ``Is that cheating? Or is it just like signing them up for tennis lessons?'' All this is not hyperbole, she said. A California court recently ruled that a girl born with Tay-Sachs disease - - a genetic disorder found in Ashkenazi Jews -- could sue her parents. And a South Carolina court recently forced a woman to undergo genetic testing for Huntington's Disease at the behest of her ex-husband who argued that he should get custody of their child because he'll live longer. Various speakers at the conference, which runs through today at the John S. Knight Center, made it clear that current ideas of life and law are becoming obsolete. One basic question becomes: What is genetic medicine? Is it just curing disease? Or is it allowing genetic enhancements to height or memory or any other personal quality? There's no easy answer, said Eric Juengst, a professor at Case Western Reserve University. Consider Prozac in the same context, he said. Should happiness come through drugs? Or should it come through self-discipline and introspection? If these social questions are difficult to answer, they're simple compared to the scientific questions. In discussing stem cell research, which relies on cells taken from embryos, the very questions of life come into play. Stem cell research has been shown to heal spinal cord injuries, cure diabetes, reverse the effects of multiple sclerosis and restore function to paralyzed limbs in mice and rats. But the morality of such advances have to be weighed against the question of whether an embryo -- the basic beginning of human life -- should be sacrificed in labs to heal others. Ronald M. Green, a professor at Dartmouth College, argued that such considerations lead to only one conclusion: That the healing powers to the living is much greater than the possibility that an embryo could become a human. At the point when stem cells are removed, he said, the embryo is in very early development when it's still possible for the embryo to divide into twins. And 80 percent of the time, he added, embryos at this stage never implant in the uterus, meaning they would not grow and develop further. ``The beginning of human life is much more complex than the life-begins- at-conception concept takes into account,'' he said. ``Eggs are not chickens. Acorns are not oak trees.'' Tracy Wheeler can be reached at 330-996-3721 or [log in to unmask] http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/docs/030028.htm ************ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask] In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn