Brainchild AbuseBad uses of good technology.

(Continued from page 1)

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In Kearns and Steinberg, I saw a familiar dynamic: one man leading with one purpose, another following with a different purpose. "Kearns isn't offering his method for aesthetic PGD," I wrote. "He doesn't have to. He's just the trailblazer who's inadvertently showing less scrupulous followers how they could make it work."

When Kearns read this description of himself, he cried foul. He pointed out, rightly, that I had omitted his explicit moral rejection of aesthetic PGD. But he went further. "By focusing so heavily on the potential abuses of the technology, I wonder whether you really understand what [PGD] is and the ethical responsibilities the medical community bears in offering this technology," he wrote. "Your article focuses on the sensational aspects of choosing children with non-medical traits and ignores the important medical advances our new technology provides couples trying to have a child free of a genetic disease."

That's part of the paradox: Bad things may come from good, but does that mean we should ignore the good? Kearns is right: We can't. But we can't ignore the bad, either. Good and bad applications of technology often rely on precisely the same breakthrough—in this case, the ability to detect complex genetic combinations. And one man's motives don't control another's. Every Kearns has his Steinberg. It's not fair, but it's the way of the world.

Part of our challenge as readers and writers of history is to see differences between individuals, even as we weave them together in a collective story. I first learned this lesson when I was writing about a political strategy that went awry. I don't think I can capture it better now than I did then: An idea passes from one person to another to another, changing shape with every transaction. No one controls the outcome. Everyone in the chain knows what the idea means to him, but no one knows how the idea will turn out.

That's the story of PGD so far. I wonder how it ends.

(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. The mind-body dieting problem. 2. Sperm banks that produce dozens of unwitting siblings. 3. Seven ways to sell your body.)

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. Follow him on Twitter here.

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