Cue the dystopian prophecies: A personal genetics company was recently awarded a patent for a system that would allow parents-to-be to pick and choose the traits of their unborn child—anything from hair color and height to muscle strength and life expectancy.The patent describes a method for what's essentially genetic shopping. Couples stipulate the characteristics they're looking for, and the technology computes which matches of sperm and egg from a marketplace of donors would produce the desired outcome. Or, in patent-speak:
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