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  NICOLE MILLER/Daily Bruin Chancellor Albert Carnesale makes his opening remarks during a panel discussion regarding genetics and the ability to choose the makeup of one's child.

By Chris Young

Daily Bruin Reporter

A decade from now, couples may be able to go to a fertility clinic with a “shopping list” to choose character traits of their future child, such as intelligence level, physical ability and body type.

A panel of UCLA faculty debated the social, ethical and legal consequences of these techniques Tuesday in Covel Commons, using as a springboard for discussion the fact that parents can already choose an embryo’s gender.

“Gender selection occurs fairly broadly,” said moderator Greg Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society in the UCLA School of Medicine. “It occurs quite frequently in India, China, Korea, a number of cultures where if you are only going to have a few children, males are generally preferred.”

The panel was divided on whether gender selection should be legal. Panel member Alan DeCherney, chair of the UCLA Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, condoned it, but said if the population size started to lean toward one sex, the government should make regulations.

But panelist Ruth Roemer, a professor at the School of Public Health, said regulation would require a review process for couples’ reasons for wanting a boy or girl, which would be difficult to regulate and also an invasion of privacy.

Techniques for gender selection will eventually be able to test for additional traits. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which has been used for more than a decade, detects the gender of test-tube fertilized embryos, so that an embryo of the desired sex can be implanted in the uterus.

PGD lets couples screen embryos for diseases such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease, and to opt whether to discard those embryos. While all the panelists approved of this use, they disagreed on whether PGD should be used to test for character traits such as intelligence or artistic ability – a possibility in coming years.

A technique called sperm sorting allows couples to choose the sex of their child by letting only the sperm of one sex fertilize the egg. Sperm sorting avoids the ethical problem of discarding living embryos as in PGD, as it dictates the child’s gender before the egg is fertilized.

DeCherney said a form of sperm selection has been in place for years at sperm banks that can determine the sex of the sperm that will inseminate the egg.

Panel member Eric Vilian, UCLA human genetics and pediatrics professor, pointed out that choosing sperm is an extension of how humans have historically mated.

“People choose their own mate, usually a person whose character traits resemble their own,” Vilian said.

For example, he said, couples usually have the same socioeconomic background and level of intelligence.

Several panelists said though there are a lot of discussions about the morality of these tests, not much has been said about the impact of the parents’ decisions on the child born. Panelist and UCLA law professor Steven Munzer said if the child were told he or she was “chosen” or “selected” above other possible children, that would have profound effects on the child.

“If a child was selected from other embryos because it had a predisposition for high intelligence, the child would feel pressure to live up to that standard,” Munzer said.

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