From Brave New World to Gattaca, writers and filmmakers have long imagined how reproductive technology might reshape humanity. In the real world, advances in genomics, stem cells, and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) could make it possible within the next few decades to remove the genetic ambiguity of sexual reproduction, enabling couples to have children who are not only free from deadly diseases, but also possess carefully selected physical and mental characteristics. In The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, law professor Henry Greely of Stanford University explores the scientific, legal, and ethical consequences of this quasi-inevitable future.
The book is about “the coming obsolescence of sex,” Greely notes in the introduction. Although people will continue to have recreational intercourse, “I expect that, sometime in the next 20 to 40 years, among humans with good health coverage, sex, in one sense, will largely disappear, or at least decrease ...
