In article
<b5658870-5468-4043-858f-420b8aee90ab@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
<sionevar@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>A part of my story hinges on a male character being unable to father
>children, but not being aware of this fact until he actually tries to
>do so. The big problem I need to overcome is how to account for this
>in an advanced society where sophisticated medical technology is
>widely available.
>
>[....]
>The cost of any medical treatment would not be a barrier, because the
>character is extremely wealthy. Neither could I get away with making
>the treatment restricted or unavailable, because the person lives in a
>prosperous and highly advanced society.
>
>Does anybody have any creative ideas they would be willing to share?
Difficult. If he's alive, he's got a basically functioning genome, which
can be extracted, cleaned up, and mated with his desired partner's DNA.
We can almost do that kind of thing today.
Does he have some terrible genetic disease? Snip it out and replace
it with genes from his partner, or from the Galactic Human Baseline
Reference Genome. Genes damaged by radiation? Ditto. Genes for early
development completely missing because he was fabricated as an adult by
a protein printer? Ditto.
I don't think a purely-technical barrier will be plausible; you need some
sort of social barrier as well.
Maybe the amount or type of genetic twiddling he needs is forbidden
or highly frowned upon (because of the previous century's Genetic
Super-Soldier Wars, of course--- this *is* space opera). He could get
it done on the gray market, or go off to Beta Colony for the procedure,
but everyone knows that the only way he could have a kid is by having
forbidden gene therapy, so the kid (and he) would be outcast or criminals.
Maybe he and his beloved come from a different legal domain with different
laws regarding genetic material, and they contain far too much stuff
that's
patented or otherwise "owned" in their new home. The IP owners either no
longer exist, or aren't contactable, or aren't willing to license for any
price. They could replace it all the encumbered genes with standard or
donated versions, but there's so much of it that their offspring wouldn't
be genetically theirs in any real sense. Or they can't prove that most of
ther genomes *aren't* patented, and so no respectable gene/birth lab will
handle them. Or some weird notion of derived works makes it impossible to
produce a legal child even if the child's genome has all the recognizable
stuff excised.
All of this, of course, misses one point, which is that there's no real
requirement that their kid share *any* biology with them beyond the
baseline humanity --- they can always adopt.
--
Wim Lewis <wiml@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Seattle, WA, USA. PGP keyID 27F772C1
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