clipped from: www.nydailynews.com   

Prospective parents will have to wait for "designer" babies.

A fertility doctor who offered to customize traits like eye and hair color is backing down and says he will mess with Mother Nature only for medical reasons - for now.

"We're going to limit it to people with genetic diseases because we just cannot keep up with what's going on," Dr. Jeff Steinberg said Tuesday.

He said a Daily News story about his plan to help parents predetermine physical traits triggered a flood of calls.

At the moment, he can't accommodate parents who want a certain eye and hair color for cosmetic reasons, he said. He'll focus instead on families with histories of albinism, color blindness and several other genetic disorders.

he's accepting requests from nonmedical cases "but we're not doing it right now."
His institute also yanked a Web site announcement on the controversial service: "PREDICTIVE GENOMICS TO BE AVAILABLE: Eye color, hair color, cancer tendency and more."