An international controversy about ''designer babies'' was sparked by a patent recently granted to a direct-to-consumer genetics company in the United States.
The patent on a method designed to enable prospective parents to choose some of their children's traits before undergoing fertility treatment was alarming many ethicists and genetics researchers, the New Zealand Science Media Centre noted in a statement.
The patent, granted to the US genetics company 23andMe laid claim to a broad genetic analysis tool for allowing parents to select for specific traits in their offspring, such as lack of specific genetic diseases, or eye colour.
''The method allows sperm and eggs to be selected that are most likely to produce traits chosen by the parents, such as eye colour or athleticism, and also allows screening out of sperm and eggs likely to lead to genetic disease,'' the media centre noted.
Prof Gavaghan, director of the New Zealand Law Foundation Centre for Emerging Technologies at the Otago Faculty of Law, emphasised the patented method could not guarantee any desired physical attributes would be present in the subsequent child but just increase their likelihood.
At some stage in the future, the technology was likely to improve and could eventually become available overseas.
The issue of parents wanting to select some of their children's physical attributes was ''a big question''.
''We probably should talk about it,'' he said in an interview.
A good discussion, without ''emoting'', would clarify any community concerns about parents helping their children up the ladder by seeking to select some of their characteristics.
The US genetics firm said it did not intend to launch a commercial service based on its patent.
However, Prof Gavaghan suspected the firm was carefully assessing the public reaction to its move.
In his book Defending the Genetic Supermarket, Prof Gavaghan had argued prospective parents should ''on the whole, be allowed to make these sorts of choices if they want; or at least, we should be able to offer them a pretty good reason if we are to ban them from doing so''.
But in any case he believed the patent process was not ''the best way to regulate'' such technology and that the ''democratic process'' should be involved if there were ''serious moral objections to these sorts of choices''.
The Human Assisted Reproduction Act in New Zealand, and its regulatory system limited the choices parents could make and selecting the sex of children was illegal, he said.
Having a ''transparent decision made by democratically accountable MPs'' was a better way of dealing with such decisions than entrusting them to a patents assessment committee, he said.
