Designer Babies

What is a Designer Babies?

Advanced reproductive technologies allow parents and doctors to screen embryos for genetic disorders and select healthy embryos.

Advanced reproductive techniques involve using InVitro Fertilisation or IVF to fertilise eggs with sperm in 'test-tubes' outside the mother's body in a laboratory. These techniques allow doctors and parents to reduce the chance that a child will be born with a genetic disorder. At the moment it is only legally possible to carry out two types of advanced reproductive technologies on humans. The first involves choosing the type of sperm that will fertilise an egg: this is used to determine the sex and the genes of the baby. The second technique screens embryos for a genetic disease: only selected embryos are implanted back into the mother's womb. This is called Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD).






Designer Baby


Until just a few years ago, making a baby boy or a baby girl was pretty much a hit-or-miss affair. Not anymore. Parents who have access to the latest genetic testing techniques can now predetermine their baby's sex with great accuracy.

Within a decade or two, it may be possible to screen kids almost before conception for an enormous range of attributes, such as how tall they're likely to be, what body type they will have, their hair and eye color, what sorts of illnesses they will be naturally resistant to, and even, conceivably, their IQ and personality type.

In fact, if gene therapy lives up to its promise, parents may someday be able to go beyond weeding out undesirable traits and start actually inserting the genes they want--perhaps even genes that have been crafted in a lab. Before the new millennium is many years old, parents may be going to fertility clinics and picking from a list of options the way car buyers order air conditioning and chrome-alloy wheels. "It's the ultimate shopping experience: designing your baby," says biotechnology critic Jeremy Rifkin, who is appalled by the prospect. "In a society used to cosmetic surgery and psychopharmacology, this is not a big step."

The prospect of designer babies, like many of the ethical conundrums posed by the genetic revolution, is confronting the world so rapidly that doctors, ethicists, religious leaders and politicians are just starting to grapple with the implications--and trying to decide how they feel about it all.

They still have a bit of time. Aside from gender, the only traits that can now be identified at the earliest stages of development are about a dozen of the most serious genetic diseases. Gene therapy in embryos is at least a few years away. And the gene or combination of genes responsible for most of our physical and mental attributes hasn't even been identified yet, making moot the idea of engineering genes in or out of a fetus. Besides, say clinicians, even if the techniques for making designer babies are perfected within the next decade, they should be applied in the service of disease prevention, not improving on nature.



Adapting a technique used on livestock, researchers at the Genetics & IVF Institute in Fairfax took advantage of a simple rule of biology: girls have two X chromosomes, while boys have one X and one Y. The mother has only Xs to offer, so the balance of power lies with the father--specifically with his sperm, which brings either an X or a Y to the fertilization party.

As it happens, Y chromosomes have slightly less DNA than Xs. So by staining the sperm's DNA with a nontoxic light-sensitive dye, the Virginia scientists were able to sort sperm by gender--with a high rate of success--before using them in artificial insemination. The first couple to use the technique was looking to escape a deadly disease known as X-linked hydrocephalus, or water on the brain, which almost always affects boys.

But while the technique is ideal for weeding out this and other X-linked disorders, including hemophilia, Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Fragile X syndrome, most patients treated at Genetics & IVF want to even out their families--a life-style rather than a medical decision.

So humans (and other species) have always created “designer babies” with various probabilities of success, and this is nothing new. With the advances in the DNA technology, the probability of producing a baby with desired traits will likely increase, but it will never be guaranteed for most traits (those with less than 100% heritability). On the other hand, if a blonde, blue-eyed woman marries (or mates with) a blond, blue-eyed man, she is virtually guaranteed to have a blonde, blue-eyed baby, whereas if she marries (or mates with) a black-haired, brown-eyed man, she substantially reduces the probability of having a blonde, blue-eyed baby. The Swedes have been producing their “designer babies” this way for thousands of years now, and they never needed any DNA technology. Every woman who chooses to marry a tall, handsome, intelligent, kind, and hard-working man instead of a short, ugly, unintelligent, mean, and lazy man is in essence unconsciously and probabilistically creating a “designer baby.”

If you could design your baby's features, would you?

Sources:


http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=127

http://www.prochoiceforum.org.uk/ocrreliss7.php

http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2001/09/designer_babies.html

http://www.bionetonline.org/English/content/db_cont1.htm


Pictures:

http://www.firstscience.com/home/images/cartoons/li160.jpg

http://blogs.usatoday.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/25/louisebrown_2.jpg

http://physiciansforwomen.net/uploads/images/baby-and-blanket.jpg