By Kate Solomon
One scientist thinks that we’ll stop having sex to make babies within 30 years.
The romantically named ‘procreative sex’ will be a thing of the past for humans, because technology will have developed far enough that designer babies will become the norm.
Rather than lighting a few candles and sticking a Marvin Gaye song on, prospective parents will head to a lab and provide the raw materials (sperm, skin cells) and scientists will put an ideal embryo together for them, rather than risking an imperfect offspring via traditional methods.
In a paper titled “The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction”, medical and law expert Henry T. Greely posits that it will a legally regulated service that will be low cost enough that everyone – not just the moneyed upper classes – can take advantage.
“Within twenty, maybe forty, years most people in developed countries will stop having sex for the purpose of reproduction,” the summary states.
“Instead, prospective parents will be told as much as they wish to know about the genetic makeup of dozens of embryos, and they will pick one or two for implantation, gestation, and birth. And it will be safe, lawful, and free.”
Parents will be told how attractive, clever and healthy each resulting embryo is likely to be.
“We won’t be able to say: ‘this child is in the top 1% of intelligence,’” Greely told the Sunday Times. “We will probably be able to to say: ‘this child has a 60% chance of being in the top half.’”
Described as “prophetic scholarship”, the paper suggests that certain hereditary diseases could be stamped out by the new method, as a handy side effect of a new super race of irritatingly perfect children that will consistently make the older generations feel terrible.
Meanwhile, people will probably keep having sex for fun. So don’t worry about that. Courtesy: Yahoo.