“The Myth of Genetic Improvement”, an article in the Council for Responsible Genetics’ GeneWatch magazine by Barry Starr, who ran the Stanford at the Tech science outreach program that I volunteered at and really enjoyed.

Nice article, talking about an issue that I think will become more and more relevant as we decipher the functions of our genes and people are tempted to cherry-pick genes for their kids. It should be ok to avoid genes that are clearly known to cause a disease, because which parent would wish that on their kids, but things become tricky when we consider more complex traits. Our understanding of genetics has a very long way before we understand all the implications of picking or leaving out any gene.

Follow the link above for the details, but the gist of it is that different genes act differently in different environment, and as a result picking a gene because we think it’s better may give us genes that are hardy and reasonably good in all conditions, but we may miss out on the truly exceptional traits that require a really rich and nurturing environment to be expressed.

It’s sort of the reverse of the movie Gattaca, as the article explains. Speaking of which, I really enjoyed that movie when it came out. And it’s rare for a Hollywood movie to have the potential to generate so much debate…(A cursory search reveals plenty of articles both for and against, I’ve found many people disliking the movie or debunking its science/ethics).

But all said and done, any movie that has an article about it in Nature Genetics is doing all right in my book 🙂