Smitha and Ankit are a couple who planned to have a baby. Smitha is a few days pregnant and she came to Breathing Labs to have her baby designed. She is welcomed by Ankush who is a trained bio life designer. Ankush welcomes Smitha to his cabinet and checks in on her health. Smitha said that she has been doing well and is extremely excited at the prospect of having a baby. He then asks for the genetic data from the embryo samples given by the medical lab at her last visit. Smitha then shares a data file with him. He also asks for the signed consent form involving signatures of the parents, and the lab that did the scan. He then loads all the genetic information onto the computer and asks her “So tell me Smitha what kind of a baby are you expecting to have?” Ankit interrupts and says “Nothing too specific in mind, just some basic requirements. We come from a family of engineers, so we were thinking that our child could foster the genes required to crack entrance exams”. Ankush smiled in familiarity, this was not the first time he was explaining to a customer that genome editing is not a genie wish list, but a bet on probabilities. Just a really accurate, well tried and tested one. “Sir we don’t have specific genes responsible for cracking JEE-3 exams unfortunately. Genetic modification is done to facilitate selection of genes” He then went on to explain the concept of CRISPR. CRISPR is a genetic engineering method that was started out in 2016-18. It did not gain popularity at its time, but that was the first recorded incident of a genetically modified baby that was born. It was achieved by 2 scientists in their lab. But in the 2040s it started becoming popular as the tech got more affordable. CRISPR became the trending term for hustler bros to discuss on their business, tech, fitness podcasts. It was mostly rants about how they worked and trained for months in the gym to gain muscles but these GM babies are born to look buff. Everyone understands science in a way that it immediately concerns them. There was a lot of debate that grew serious on if GM babies were ethical for the human race. Once you introduce the first baby into the world and they grow up to procreate, we introduce genetic modification into the human gene pool and it is irreversible after that. The reason this sparked a debate was because of Lulu and Nana. They were the first genetically modified babies born in November 2018. Nana gave a public statement to the media as soon as she turned 18 that she shall not involve in any means of procreation whatsoever. This was because they had become a center of attraction to a lot of media attention. But Lulu said no such thing, she wanted to live a normal life because she claimed that it was never her choice to be born this way and that she should not be penalized for it. There were numerous rallies with signboards that said we don’t want our babies to become mutants and it was also almost immediately politicized. Because of many incidents and misconceptions on genetic modification and unreal advertising campaigns for decades, consumers like Ankit and Smitha have very wrong perceptions on GM babies. Ankush shows them a dashboard on the screen which had some vitals. “The baby has the right number of chromosomes, which is a good thing. We will not have to worry about medical conditions”. The software he was using was an Adobe software called Jeena. Jeena was an Indian company founded by Amisha Sharma, named by someone who thought Jeena was the perfect amalgamation pun for genes and life. It was acquired by Adobe 1 year into its popularity. Jeena had well designed ML models. Its models had a UNBS rating of almost 75%, which was the highest at that time. UNBS is a system that was used to measure algorithmic biases or how biased a training dataset is. It was a result of the continuous efforts initially started by Joy Buolamwini. Everytime, you enter a baby’s genetic makeup into Jeena. It runs it through multiple ML models which then give you predictions on how the baby could look. You then enter a character editing interface like the ones we used to have in early age realistic video games like Cyberpunk. You get to choose every physical characteristic of the baby for different age levels based on the ML predictions. You can also choose intellectual capabilities as well. This parametric system involved aspects like critical thinking, aptitude, problem solving etc. Ankush explained to Ankith that there was no specific metric that guaranteed an IIT seat but studies have shown that babies with 80+ aptitude and 90+ retention capacity generally clear these exams. Ankith told him to implement that and Ankush altered the RC and aptitude metrics. They had enough money to afford one more modification so he asked Ankush to give the baby curly hair like Smitha. Apparently that was what he found attractive in her. It did not seem like Smitha had much to say or disagree. Ankush did all the necessary changes and exported the modified file. He told Ankit to go and give it to the medical lab and they will imprint it on the embryo cells. He told them to specify that they wanted a print in the BNCK format, because assistants tend to use cheaper alternatives like MPGs and that could cause data loss which Breathing labs does not insure