We’re terrified of designer babies, but not for the reason you think

An ancient play explains how old our fear is. The first appearance of the word ‘robot’ is in Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR) by Karel Capek, which premiered in Prague in 1921. The word is derived from the Czech for ‘serf labor’. (It’s no coincidence that the recent critically acclaimed animation The wild robot calls its protagonist “Rozzum 7134”.) In RUR, robots are indistinguishable from humans, as fleshy, limbed and doe-eyed as any baby, less of a tin can and more of the kind of android you’d find in Bladerunner, all created in factories with a view to service, both in the fields and in homes. That is, until they finally get the idea to rise up and kill most of their creators in a mass uprising.

In RUR, the entire story hinges on whether or not more of these robots can be created, by their human designers or by themselves. It’s a matter of children. And now when you look back at this piece – written in a Europe devastated by war – you realize that you are looking at Capek’s own world, polished for attention.

Our fear of technology reflects the world we live in, not the world that doesn’t yet exist. When a Czech writer set out to write his script over a hundred years ago, no one yet understood how DNA worked. We knew the fetus was growing in the womb. We eventually discovered that it did not, in fact, resemble a plant – and sperm resemble a seed – as had been thought for centuries. When Capek conceived of a robot as made entirely of flesh – a person who would not qualify as a person but would look like one, a person believed to be less capable of feeling, built for and trapped was in a life of labor – it was not so far beyond the scientific imagination to think as he did.

Even now, the full function of DNA remains remote. What we called “junk DNA” just a decade ago seems to play a mysterious role at various times in our lives. There will inevitably come a time when our future selves will look back on our current fears and think we were foolish for thinking it would be so easy to manipulate a child’s genetic destiny.

So we fear a world of genetically engineered babies that only a few can have, children who live endlessly with little pain, while others suffer and die young. We fear that people live in obligations because of the bodies they happen to have. And we fear that people living under such conditions will seek revenge. The truth is we are afraid ourselves and the ugliness that already exists in our world. As a woman living in America, I will probably live 20 years longer than a woman in Chad. Fear of IVF is a distraction. It’s a way of pretending that a future hell doesn’t exist yet.

Joy is in cinemas from November 15; Cat Bohannon is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Driven 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Penguin, £12.99)