In the future, sex will lose its reproductive purpose and children will be born in tubes and after careful selection.... Is it credible?
Sex: in 20 or 30 years it will no longer be needed, at least not to make children. The sad prediction is formulated by Hank Greely, an expert in genetics and neuroscience at Stanford University.
According to the illustrious academician, within a few decades couples will limit themselves to choosing the embryo to be born among those created in a test tube from their DNA, extracted directly from stem cells.
The selection, says Greely, will allow not only to eradicate genetic diseases and malformations, but will gradually extend to various characteristics: the color of the eyes, height, the type of physics and, why not, intellectual faculties.
The ethical implications of such a scenario are obvious: the risk is that of creating a society similar to that imagined by Aldous Huxley in the 1930s of the last century, in the novel The New World. In the dystopian future told by Huxley, children are "artificial products", with intelligence and physical characteristics defined on the basis of the work to which they are predestined.
Our future will not be so dramatic, but DNA editing through techniques such as CRISPR and embryo selection are already a reality today. It is only a question of perfecting the methodologies, initially to allow couples who cannot conceive to have children.