This is Biodic Bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Bioethics Bites is made an association with Oxford's Urohero Center for Practical Ethics and made possible by a grant from the Welcome Trust.

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the term designer baby is usually used in a pejorative sense

to conjure up some dystopian brave new world. There are already ways to affect

what kind of children you have, most obviously by choosing the partner you have

them with. But there are others too. A pregnant mother can improve her baby's prospects by eating nutritious food in pregnancy, for instance,

and avoiding smoking or drinking alcohol. With advances in genetics, however,

there will soon be radical new methods to select or

influence the characteristics of your progeny not just physical characteristics

like height or eye color but intellectual capacities and capacities linked to morality such as how

empathetic the child will be. The big question is how much freedom parents should

have to make such selections. Julian Sevelescu of Oxford Uhero's Centre for Practical Ethics

believes that if we can genetically alter the next generation,

not only should we be free to do so,

it may even turn out that in some circumstances we have an obligation to go ahead and do it.

Julian Savalescu, welcome to Bioethics Bites.

Good afternoon, Nigel.

We're going to focus on the topic of designer babies. Now, could you just begin by saying a little bit about what is possible?

So today we can use various technologies either of testing the fetus or of embryos to look at the genetic

...