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potential might see us stumbling into a new culture of eugenics. A combination of free parental choice and the preferences of employers and insurers would not only make genotypes of the wrong profile or gender less desirable than ever, it might prevent many of them being born at all.

We might come full circle and share a dilemma familiar to the peasant farmer in the Yangtze Basin. The cultural pressures acting on him and his forebears have created a warped demographic in South-East Asia whereby men outnumber women by tens of millions. The disproportion is large enough to mirror the excess of females in the countries most damaged by the two world wars.

While Bangalore leads a regional technological revolution, elsewhere in India dowry deaths' still occur. In China, it is illegal for doctors to disclose a child's gender before birth. Where male children are culturally and economically useful and their sisters deemed a burden or a liability, parents will too often follow an old pattern. The ability to determine gender in utero is a relatively recent development, so historically infanticide has been far more common than any other form of choosing a baby's gender.

This debate can't be led by science, as technology only changes the means by which old prejudices are enacted. Unless positive cultural change is pursued, gender selection in all its time-honoured horror will keep happening regardless of how people in white coats, pin-stripe suits or GAP t-shirts feel about it.

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