Want a baby? Worried it might have your receding chin or your spouse's big nose, or worse, both? Don't be. Beautiful babies are now for sale on the Internet. Well, actually what's for sale isn't quite a baby yet--it's just the stuff babies are made of. You know, eggs and sperm, but not just any old eggs and sperm. These genetic products come from models, and they're available online at a web site launched by fashion photographer Ron Harris.

Bids at the Internet auction site start at from $15,000 to $150,000. You'll still need to find some woman willing to have the baby-making material implanted in her after you've made your purchase. And for the time being, Harris only has model eggs for sale, no sperm. But hey, why not check out one of the sperm banks specializing in genius donors? Maybe you'll end up with a baby that looks like Cindy Crawford and thinks like Bill Gates.

Then again, you might end up with one that looks like Bill Gates and thinks like Cindy Crawford--no tragedy, certainly, but not quite what you paid a quarter or half a million dollars for.

Many couples are not content with just any child. Why not have the best child, the prettiest, smartest, tallest, most athletic, musically gifted, graceful child imaginable? A designer child, put together from the very best components available.

Babies turned into commodities. Why stop at auctioning off only eggs and sperm? Why not make designer embryos available, too? And why not wait until delivery before making purchase? Or later yet. If it's intelligence you're after, maybe it would be best to wait until her IQ can be tested. If it's looks you're interested in, maybe you should defer final purchase until you make sure his face actually catches up to his ear size, or that her baby fat melts away during puberty. Perhaps some creative entrepreneur will create a lease/option-to-buy plan whereby prospective parents can try the child out while they're deciding whether to make final purchase.

Unthinkable? Don't bet on it. Who would have imagined even a few years ago that fashion models would be hawking their ova to the highest bidder on computer screens throughout the world?

No longer viewed as a gift of life from God, entrusted to his or human parents for a brief period only, a child becomes a thing. Valuable as it is beautiful or smart, healthy or strong. Implicitly, less valuable as it is plain or dull, sick or weak. We have created not a Brave New World, but a vulgar marketplace, where human attributes come with a price tag.

LONDON  - The next millennium generation of children could start school at three, launch their own businesses at 20 and live until the age of 120, according to a leading British think-tank.

``New 'Third Age' (elderly) relationships will frequently be forged and youth will no longer hold exclusive rights to the notion of beauty,'' said Melanie Howard of the Future Foundation.

``People won't want to retire at 60, nor will they be prepared to see themselves as old,'' she said in the report predicting revolutionary changes in lifestyle.

With advances in medical science bringing much greater longevity, people may have time for up to three careers interspersed with extended terms of education.

It also predicted that one third of women will decide not to have children and more couples will not marry.

The scientist who created Britain's first test-tube baby has said it will soon be a "sin" for parents to give birth to disabled children. Bob Edwards, the world-renowned embryologist who worked to produce Louise Brown by in-vitro fertilization in 1978, said the increasing availability of prenatal screening for genetic disease gave parents a moral responsibility not to give birth to disabled children.

Edwards said that he welcomed the dawn of an age in which every child would be wanted and genetically acceptable. "Soon it will be a sin of parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children."

He believes people should not recoil from the inevitability of fertility treatment and screening becoming a tool of social engineering. New diagnostic techniques already enable the screening of embryos before they are put into their host mother.

The process is used on all embryos in some American clinics to screen out specific genetic defects. As more genes are identified, it will be possible to perform more sophisticated tests on embryos.

Edwards was speaking at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in France, as doctors in Britain finalize proposals for the first comprehensive national screening program for Down's syndrome in all unborn babies.

Some people believe Edwards's comments reflect the views of most British doctors, and that women will be increasingly pressed into agreeing to the termination of affected pregnancies. One obstetrician, who declined to be identified, said: "There is a fear that we are moving towards eugenics--the improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding. It is extremely common for women to be offered terminations for abnormality." Some hospitals even offer to abort fetuses with defects that can be corrected, such as cleft palate.

Anya Souza, 37, an artist who was born with Down's syndrome, tours the country educating people about disabilities. She enjoys an independent life in a London flat she shares with her boyfriend. "I don't think my life is worth any less than the lives of other people," she said. "I think getting rid of a baby because it has Down's is wrong. It's something you just don't do to children."

Details of the first human embryo to be cloned have been released. The watershed achievement in biotechnology actually happened last November, but more information was revealed recently. It was achieved using a cell from a man's leg and a cow's egg.

The scientists who created the clone see it as a significant step forward in the search for a way of producing human stem cells. These are "master" cells which can develop into any type of cell--skin, bone, blood etc.

But this development will also see a significant heightening of the debate over the ethics of human cloning and, indeed, what it means to be a human.

American Cell Technology (ACT), a leading, private biotechnology company, cloned the first human embryo and let it develop for twelve days before destroying it. In a normal pregnancy, an embryo implants into the womb wall after 14 days.

Lord Robert Winston, a British fertility expert, said the research was "totally ethical." But opponents say that the development of the technology makes the eventual birth of a human clone inevitable. This, they say, would have profound implications for the nature of family relationships, the law and health.

Tanja Dominko focuses her microscope on a glistening monkey egg recently retrieved from a female rhesus's ripened ovary. Nudging a high-tech joystick, she directs a hair-thin glass needle toward the silvery orb, gently piercing its outer coat.

Ms. Dominko is part of a team at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, the only facility in the United States trying to clone a monkey. But if this effort goes as others have, this newly formed cell will become two cells, then four, perhaps eight, then die.

Cloning, it turns out, is a serious health risk, usually resulting in death for the clones themselves and sometimes even killing the mothers pregnant with those clones. Moreover, as cloners expand their efforts to a variety of animals, including cows, goats, sheep and mice, it's becoming clear that the problem is not simply one of beginner's bad luck.

"There are a hell of a lot of deaths along the way," said Gerald Schatten, the head of Ms. Dominko's lab. At Beaverton, no cloned embryo has survived long enough even to count as a pregnancy. In other large mammals, such as sheep and cows, researchers are finding that about half of all clones that develop into fetuses harbor serious abnormalities, including peculiar defects in the heart, lungs and other organs, many of them fatal before birth. Others have succumbed weeks or months after birth, dying suddenly and mysteriously after a seemingly healthy start.

There is growing evidence that at least some of these abnormalities and deaths are linked to a disruption of a genetic mechanism known as "imprinting," which is nature's way of ensuring that every baby has two parents.

Human cloning may be "impossible to try to stop," the chairman of the National Bioethics Advisory Committee said. Harold Shapiro said the technology necessary for human cloning is developing with "stunning speed," Knight Ridder news service reported.