So I had my first genuinely 21st-century moment the other day. I was in the car, driving west to Santa Monica, when I asked my wife how her friend Nancy (not her real name) was doing. Nancy is unable to have a baby and for years has been undergoing expensive and exhausting IVF treatments. “Oh, Nancy's great,” said my wife, cheerfully. “Didn't you hear? She's having a superbaby.”

A superbaby?

First, some history. The concept of using test-tube technology to a create a future US president, or a future chess grandmaster, has been around since the early 1980s, when a San Diego businessman called Robert K. Graham founded the Repository for Germinal Choice. The repository was a sperm bank with a difference: only Nobel prize winners or other “geniuses” could donate. Graham, as you might imagine, was a big believer in eugenics, the Californian race-purification scheme of the early 1900s that so inspired the Nazis. Before the repository closed in 1999, Graham's “supersperm” had created about 200 children, a few of whom were tracked by the Slate journalist David Plotz. One of the superbabies, Jon, recounted to Plotz how his mother kept telling him not to consider his father a role model, because he was “better than that”. Jon was finally told about his super-DNA when he tried to leave high school at 16 to become a professional wrestler.

Technology has come a long way since then. Nancy is one of a growing number of infertile women who want to have a baby but either can't use their partner's sperm to fertilise a donor egg, or simply don't want to. As a result, her superbaby will be more of a megababy: conceived using not only donated sperm but also a donated egg, with the embryo carried by a surrogate. As you can imagine, both the sperm and the egg will be vetted ruthlessly, based on donor IQ and looks. As for the superdonors, they are mostly broke Ivy League students. These days, supereggs fetch up to $50,000, while supersperm goes for $1,200 per teaspoonful.

Is any of this a good idea? My doubts can be summed up by the case of the superbaby who recently found herself in limbo when her parents split up before her birth. It took the courts three years to work out to whom she belonged. Then there was the case of the couple who inherited eggs from their late daughter, and decided to “make” super- grandchildren. This is known as “posthumous collaborative reproduction”.

The issues are too numerous and too complex to go into here. Suffice to say that I'm reminded of a newspaper cartoon that circulated a few years ago. It featured a mum and a dad and their superbaby, posing together. “Thank God we found the sperm of that astronaut,” the mother said. “Thank God we found the eggs of that supermodel,” the dad said. The superbaby, meanwhile, was looking up at its doting creators. Above its head was a thought bubble: “Who the hell are these stupid, ugly people?”

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