 If you wanted to see if your unborn child had the genetic makeup of a football superstar and you failed the first three times, should you use a puntet square? Clever girl. Hi internet, I'm Josh, and this is Thunk. This is a special video that I'm dedicating to my sister Rebecca, who is a geneticist by training and annoying by nature. Also, this hat is going to leave big, ugly marks on my forehead at the end of the video, so watch for that. Spend no expense. Recently, Rebecca, who's thought about going into genetic counseling as a profession, has expressed a concern over telling potential parents what their potential children will potentially be like, and then allowing those potential parents to choose whether or not to have those potential children. First, let me say that genetic counselors are prohibited by law from telling potential parents what to do with their potential children. They're not allowed to recommend abortions, and this video isn't about abortions. This video is about what happens when you let parents choose or potentially build exactly the kids that they want. I mean, selecting for traits in your offspring isn't really anything new. That's why we don't want to have sex with unattractive people. What is new is the level of detail that we can specify in our children. For example, instead of simply having sex with someone of Asian descent and hoping that your children inherit their black hair, Rebecca can look at all of the genes involved and tell you the exact percentage chance that your children will have that hair. Of course, the amount that we know about the human genome is growing every day, and it's hard to tell where we might end up, especially considering now that scientists have harnessed the power of genetic engineering. Once again, people have been genetically engineering things like breeds of dogs for millennia. However, in 1978, a company called Genentech inserted a DNA sequence that coded for human insulin into the DNA of an E. coli virus. Before that point, diabetics had to use insulin harvested from pigs, which had all sorts of complications in its use. Today, almost all insulin in the world is human insulin produced through genetic engineering. And that was just the beginning. I mean, if you haven't stopped to consider the fact that you can buy a fish that has been modified on the genetic level with algae DNA to glow in the dark, let's just stop and appreciate that. But maybe instead of a glow-in-the-dark fish, you'll want a kid with black hair, or a kid who's super tall, or a kid who puts on muscle really easily. Just find the right gene sequence, splice it into the embryo, and you're good to go. Well, sort of. Besides the whole playing-god argument, which has been cited more or less continuously since well before the invention of the lightning rod, the use of genetic engineering has a real moral conundrum attached to it. First, giving people control over the characteristics of their children can have far-reaching effects that you really wouldn't think of while you're designing your child to have red hair and a birthmark shaped like a slice of pizza. For example, in China, there's a widespread cultural preference for sons over daughters. When the one child per household policy was enacted there, many parents performed infanticide on babies that were born female, preferring to keep them male once. Now, that's terrible, but as an unexpected result, there are a lot of young Chinese men right now who can't get a date, and if you thought being a romantically frustrated teenager was bad, couple that with the thought that there aren't any other fish in the sea. That's not a recipe for social stability. Second, as of right now, things are hard enough if you come from a poor family, and genetic engineering and counseling are expensive. This begs the question, when the rich kids aren't just going to better schools in better areas that are mostly free from crime, when they get to be taller, stronger, and maybe even smarter too, what happens to the gap between the classes then? Of course, there's also the exciting possibility of using genetic engineering to improve humanity as a whole, to make our children exponentially better than we are. Maybe we could have a whole generation of human beings who are intelligent and thoughtful and could leave a lot of really excellent comments on this video. On that note, you don't have to be some sort of philosopher king to leave a comment. If you have any questions or thoughts about a video from asking me to explain something a little bit better to pointing out that I really suck at lighting, please let me know. I really appreciate the feedback. To that end, if you're watching this video in a place that doesn't really facilitate commenting, then feel free to use this email address that I've created, thunkshow at gmail.com, for show suggestions or hat suggestions or whatever. Thank you, you see the bumps? Thank you for watching. Next week, I'm going to talk about game design and the hedonistic treadmill. I am going to be on vacation, so the video may be a day early or a day late, or maybe you'll have to wait for a little while, but I'll try to get it up on time, and I'll see you next week.