Genomics firm 23andMe patents ‘designer baby' system, promises not to use it

The homepage for 23andMe, a company that offers to test your DNA to scan for heritable diseases.23andMe

An illustration from 23andMe's patent application for a "designer baby" system.23andMe

A personal genetics firm was recently granted a patent on a system that lets you predict the traits of a baby -- but the company promises not to use.

The Mountain View, Calif., company 23andMe just announced the patent for a system that would let parents to be chose traits they’d like to pass on or suppress in their children, from hair and eye color to susceptibility to diseases.

"Taken out of 'patentese,' what 23andMe is claiming is a method by which prospective donors of ova and/or sperm may be selected so as to increase the likelihood of producing a human baby with characteristics desired by the prospective parents," explained Sigrid Sterckx, a bioethicist at Ghent University in Belgium, in an essay published Thursday on Nature.

'We’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so.'

- Catherine Afarian, a 23andMe spokeswoman

"What is claimed is not a cast-iron, fool-proof method guaranteeing that the eventual child will have all the phenotypic traits on the parents’ shopping list, an impossible task, but merely a method of improving the chances that the baby has the right' characteristics," she wrote.

An image of the system associated with the patent shows a simple, pull-down menu to design your offspring: “I prefer a child with a low risk of colorectal cancer,” for example, or “I prefer a child with a high probability of blue eyes.”

But rest assured, the company told Wired it promises not to use the technology.

“When we originally introduced the tool and filed the patent there was some thinking the feature could have applications for fertility clinics,” said Catherine Afarian, a 23andMe spokeswoman. “But we’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so.”

Filed in December 2008, the patent was meant to cover the technology that supports a service the company currently offers, called Family Traits Inheritance Calculator. That service allows parents to scan their own personal genome and highlight the risk of passing certain diseases or susceptibility to them along to their offspring.

But the language of the patent extends beyond the Calculator, the company said. It offered details on the system in the blog post to be very clear about the technology and the company’s intentions.

A design-a-baby service isn’t in the works, but the services the company does offer are still of use to parents.

“Individuals use our service to get personalized information about their health and ancestry. This information empowers them to be more involved in managing their own health. It also offers them more insight into themselves, their traits and their family’s ancestry,” the company wrote.

Still, Sterckx was concerned that such a broad, potentially disturbing patent was approved.

"it is clear that selecting children in ways such as those patented by 23andMe is hugely ethically controversial," she wrote.

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Russian President Medvedev Promises Punishment for Space Mishaps (ContributorNetwork)

According to Space.com, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is threatening to punish officials who are judged to be responsible for a series of space mishaps that have embarrassed that country's space effort.

What are some of the mishaps that have plagued the Russian space program?

The most recent accident concerned Russia's ambitious attempt to send a probe, dubbed Phobos-Grunt, to the Martian moon Phobos to take soil and rock samples and return them to Earth. Phobos-Grunt was stuck in low Earth orbit, having failed to executed a pair of rocket firings that would have sent it on a trajectory toward Mars.

In August, a Russian Progress spacecraft that carrying supplies to the International Space Station suffered a failure of its Soyuz rocket and instead of going to the ISS crashed into Siberia, according to Space.com. The mishap resulted in serious doubts about the ability of the Russians to provide transportation services for both cargo and humans, leading to the possibility that the ISS would have to be abandoned. However the Russians were able to find the cause of the glitch that had destroyed the Progress and have since been able to launch both a Progress cargo mission and a manned Soyuz to the ISS.

Why is Medvedev contemplating punitive action?

Russia clearly sees space travel as an expression of a country that expires to be a super power. It has had this attitude ever since the early space program, when the old Soviet Union was able to accomplish a series of space spectaculars, including Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, and the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in low Earth orbit. More recently, with the end of the space shuttle program, the Russian Space Agency boasted that the world had entered into the "Age of Soyuz" with America being forced to rely on Russia for trips to the ISS. There was even a dig at the fact that the Americans had lost two space shuttles, the Challenger and Columbia, with the boast of how reliable the Soyuz was. This form of chest pounding has come back to haunt the Russians in view of the Progress and Phobos-Grunt failures.

What does Medvedev propose to do to people he finds responsible for Russian space failures?

Reuters reports that the Russian president, perhaps in a fit of whimsy, has promised that they would not be stood up against a wall and shot, as was the practice in Josef Stalin's time. But criminal penalties, including imprisonment and fines, as well as administrative penalties are on the table.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.

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Obama Sends Mixed Messages, Questionable Promises on Space Program (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | The Space Politics website relates what President Obama said about the future of the U.S. space program in an interview with local media in Ohio recently, among the first the president made on the subject since his infamous Kennedy Space Center speech:

"Well, I believe in the space program. Look, I'm turning 50 in about a month and a half. But, that means that I grew up being inspired by Apollo and the Moon landing. So the key, even though the space shuttle is phasing out, is, what's that next big leap? And that's going to require research. That's exactly part of our plan is to make sure that we're researching new fuel, new mechanisms to allow for long-term space flight. There's some additional technological leaps that we have to make because, basically, we're using the same technologies that we were using back in the 60s, in a lot of cases. That's why a research facility of NASA's is going to continue to be critical because we want to find what are those next technological leaps that will take us not just to the Moon, but take us to Mars and beyond."

The emphasis on technology development is not a surprise. Obama emphasized space exploration technology development when the original budget was announced that cancelled the Constellation space exploration program. The president's focus was certainly relevant for Ohio, the home of the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Obama is very keen to keep as many jobs as possible in a state that he must win in 2012 if he hopes to be reelected. The last statewide poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling, showed that 46 percent of Ohioans approved of Obama's job performance as opposed to 49 percent who disapproved.

The technology development program in the space plan has been criticized for lacking direction and not being tied to a specific program of exploration. Furthermore, the strategy of emphasizing technology over actual exploration has run headlong into congressional opposition, which has mandated the development of a spacecraft that looks pretty much like the Orion and a launch system that looks pretty much like the Ares V that were part of the now canceled Constellation.

Obama announced belatedly in his April 15, 2010, speech at the Kennedy Space Center an exploration program that would send astronauts to an Earth approaching asteroid, and finally to Mars over the next several decades. The Moon would be, in effect, bypassed. This program has been criticized as well for being too vaguely defined, not tied to any overarching strategy, and heading in the wrong destination.

That was what makes the last sentence the president uttered all the more interesting. He said the Moon and Mars -- he did not mention an asteroid. Could it be that the president has yet another change in direction for the space program in mind, perhaps to be announced at an appropriate moment in the presidential campaign?

The recent discovery of water on the Moon would certainly provide an excuse for heading back there and away from chasing asteroids. Indeed, such an announcement would tend to shake up the narrative that has taken home of Obama as destroyer of America's space future.

Of course, one must be cautious when approaching any promise that the president makes on the campaign trail. During the 2008 campaign, he implied support for the Constellation program in a speech before aerospace workers in Titusville, Fla. That promise turned out to have an expiration date. Anything that comes out of his mouth in the future likely will as well.

Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker. He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the L.A. Times, and The Weekly Standard.

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