Prof Armand Leroi, of Imperial College London, said that within five to ten years it will be common for young people to pay to access their entire genetic code.
He told the Euroscience Open Forum 2012, in Dublin, that a desire to have a healthy baby will lead more to request access to the view the genes of any prospective partner.
Armed with this information, the couple could then use IVF to screen babies with incurable diseases.
While it was unlikely people will have the "luxury" of using the technology to design babies, by their intellect or eye colour, they would instead focus on stopping genetic diseases.
Addressing a session titled "I human: are new scientific discoveries challenging our identity as a species", he said the cost of genetic sequencing was falling so quickly that "it is going to become very, very accessible, very, very soon".
The cost of doing a complete genetic map of a person has fallen from $1 billion (£648m) more than a decade ago to about $4,000 (£2593).
He said eugenics were already available, with tens of thousands of unborn babies with Down's syndrome and other illnesses being aborted every year.
Comment: see also: DNA as Predictor of Disease is Over-hyped