Designer Babies

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Designer Babies
Topic Started: Apr 7 2009, 12:32 PM (322 Views)
Sayf Udeen Ismaeel	Apr 7 2009, 12:32 PM Post #1
Icon by meagan_chelsea @ LJ Posts: 7,579 Group: Admins Member #1 Joined: May 2, 2008 Gender Male Religious Views Muslim Political View All over the shop.	Can Babies Be Made-to-Order? A fertility clinic says it will give couples the option of fiddling with the blueprints for their broods. But how much flexibility will--or should--they have? DESIGNER BABIES: Scientists may soon have the capability to select embryos with certain traits, such as eye and hair color A U.S. fertility clinic has announced that within six months it will begin offering couples the option to have tailor-made babies, selecting not only their offspring's gender but also cosmetic traits such as hair and eye color. The Fertility Institutes, an organization which has offices in New York City, Los Angeles and Mexico, says it can provide this service using a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, according to the New York Daily News. Critics have denounced the idea as unethical tinkering with nature, among them Pope Benedict XVI, who called the practice an "obsessive search for the perfect child [that] tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity," the Daily News reports. Others question whether child-customization is actually possible to pull off. Sean Tipton, a spokesperson for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Ala., told ScientificAmerican.com that peddling eye and hair color selection is like "Virgin Atlantic offering to sell [people] tickets … to the moon." He says he is not aware of any published research showing that PGD can be used to dictate eye and hair color. "The science is not there," Tipton insists. PGD has long been used to screen for genetic diseases in embryos used for in vitro fertilization (IVF), and some parents have used the technology to create embryos that are genetically compatible stem cell and bone marrow donors for their ailing siblings, as illustrated in the case of Adam and Molly Nash and in the novel My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. We asked Maria Lalioti, a geneticist and PGD specialist at Yale University School of Medicine, to explain the procedure and exactly how far it can go. [An edited transcript of the interview follows.] What is pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)? PGD is technology that allows scientists to look for genetic diseases and chromosome problems in embryos implanted in women using in vitro fertilization [a procedure used by couples struggling with fertility wherein scientists combine a woman's egg with a man's sperm in a laboratory dish, then implant the resulting embryo in a woman's uterus]. The idea behind PGD to find out if something is wrong with an embryo before implanting it in a woman's uterus. Some couples use PGD because genetic diseases run in their families and they want to make sure that their children are not affected—these diseases include cystic fibrosis [a disease in which sufferers produce profuse amounts of thick mucus that can clog the airways and cause fatal lung infections] and thalassemias [inherited blood anemia disorders]. Other couples use PGD to find out if they have chromosomal abnormalities blocking them from having successful pregnancies. For example, some women produce a large number of eggs with abnormal numbers of chromosomes that, when fertilized, produce embryos that cannot develop into healthy fetuses. How long have fertility specialists been using this technique? Since about the early 1990s. How is PGD done? First women go through IVF, which begins with taking hormones that stimulate egg production. Usually a woman's ovaries produce only one fertilizable egg per month, but fertility drugs stimulate the production of 10 to 15 eggs. Doctors remove these eggs using a needle, then bring them to the laboratory to be fertilized. This is done by taking a sperm, putting it inside a needle, and injecting it into the egg. They let the fertilized egg grow for two days, during which it divides into a ball of eight identical cells. An embryologist removes one cell from this mass of cells and tests it for Down's syndrome, cystic fibrosis or whatever disorder the couple is concerned may be in their DNA. To test for a genetic disease, scientists take a section of DNA from the cell and use a technology called polymerase chain reaction to produce multiple copies of sections of genes that could contain an error or mutation that could cause a disease. Then they run the DNA samples through a sequencing machine that sorts the gene fragments according to size. If there is an abnormal-size fragment, this could indicate a genetic flaw. Does extracting a cell put an embryo at risk? It is not dangerous to remove one cell if it is done by someone trained to do the procedure. But if other cells are damaged in the process the embryo will stop growing. What happens to the embryos? Usually one or two of them are implanted into the woman's uterus with a very big plastic needle that is inserted through the vagina. [The hope is that at least one embryo will attach to the uterine wall and begin developing.] What happens to the defective embryos? It's up to the patients to decide what to do with the undesirable embryos. They may donate them to science or discard them. Can PGD be used to choose the embryo's gender? It can be used to select an embryo that will develop into the desired gender. Scientists use the same method of removing a cell from the eight-cell embryo, and then look inside the nucleus for segments of DNA that are known to lie on the X chromosome [females have two X's] or the Y chromosome [males have one X and one Y]. Basically, you put the cell on a glass slide and apply a probe, a piece of DNA labeled with a color that will stick to either the X or Y chromosome. [For example, a green probe may be chosen to latch onto the X chromosome and a blue probe onto the Y.] If scientists detect two green probes, that means there are two X chromosomes, and hence it will develop into a girl. If there is one green and one blue probe, then there is one X and one Y, and it's a boy in the making. We don't allow gender selection at this clinic, because our fertility experts are opposed to it for ethical reasons. But there are clinics that do it, and they are making a lot of money. Can you use PGD to pre-determine eye and hair color? I would think it's not possible with technology available today. You would have to be looking for multiple genes [there is no single gene that encodes, say, green eyes or blond hair], which is not easy to do using only one cell. Future technology, however, will most likely make this possible. Then, you would just need to know what genes determine the color of eyes and hair. Do you think scientists should try to use PGD to select for traits such as eye and hair color, intelligence or height? This is an ethical concern. If you do this, then you've given priority to something that it shouldn't have. Our main focus is to detect disease. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=designer-babies-preimplantation-genetic-diagnosis-pgd



sabre	Apr 7 2009, 01:43 PM Post #2
Super Spok to the rescue! Posts: 1,244 Group: Members Member #218 Joined: Sep 16, 2008 Gender Male Religious Views Atheist Political View freedom and all that shizzle	ITT: Madonnas future fad. im not sure about the ethics of it



Bunny	Apr 11 2009, 04:13 AM Post #3
A Godless life seems sweeter Posts: 1,866 Group: Members Member #17 Joined: May 4, 2008 Religious Views Atheist Gender Undisclosed Political View Rt Wing. Less Govt is Better!	Look, if parents really want to change their kid's eye colour or hair colour, then so be it. If they want to make certian say, that their kid won't be autistic, then I'm all good with it. It's when they start fiddling with brainpower, and characteistic traits, that I start to get pissed off. A child will always be something unpredictable. He or she could be smart, dumb, annoying, playful, thoughtful, good at piano, good at soccer, etc. And that's something that comes with the package. What you get in your child, and what your child gets in theirselves, is completely random. And if you can't accept that, you shouldn't be having kids. If you can't accept that your child might not conform to what you want he/she to be, then you shouldn't be having kids. Which is why, principally, I'm against this.



Redneck	Apr 11 2009, 06:03 AM Post #4
Posts: 266 Group: Members Member #48 Joined: May 25, 2008 Gender Male Political View Liberal Facist	I really don't have an opinion on this. The most I can formulate is that this technology should be used to prevent dieseases and retardation. I don't think this matters because the vast majority of people will still be having kids the old fashioned was, three beers and smelly hotel, and it will only be the rich who do this.



queen of hearts	Jun 11 2009, 09:24 PM Post #5
Posts: 25 Group: Members Member #615 Joined: Jun 7, 2009 Gender Female Religious Views Pagan	taking away faulty genes i agree with, being able to pick what your child looks like, hair colour etc is wrong



gingerwitch28	Jun 12 2009, 08:21 AM Post #6
twenty-first century ennui Posts: 1,689 Group: Members Member #589 Joined: Apr 18, 2009 Gender Female Religious Views Atheist Political View Social Democracy	Ethics aside, it would be totally boring if parents decided they all wanted, say, bunch of brown haired blue eyed kids. Variety is the spice of life!



FMPBeats	Jun 12 2009, 08:58 PM Post #7
Posts: 670 Group: Members Member #606 Joined: May 21, 2009 Gender Male Religious Views Muslim	medically I'm fine with it, if genetic diseases are removed, that's great. But otherwise, it is just fooling arround with things that we don't know about. While we may think we are just changing eye colour, we might be doing all sorts of damage without realising it, DNA is very complex and has a lot of 'hidden' information.



Redneck	Jun 14 2009, 01:06 AM Post #8
Posts: 266 Group: Members Member #48 Joined: May 25, 2008 Gender Male Political View Liberal Facist	Well I can see the pro and the cons of this and I'm not sure were I really stand on this. From a religious standpoint I don't give a shit, but I know the righties will be pitching shit fits over this. My biggest concern over all of this is, how much do we really know about genetics? Yeah we think we know a lot but we've thought we knew a lot about a lot of other things and we fucked up. For the good of the speices this is probably good. it eliminates weaknesses in our gene pools, but at the same time what if those weaknesses are something that may benefit us in some other way that we have over looked.



thelovablevagabond	Jun 17 2009, 01:42 PM Post #9
Exceptionally Pretentious and Opinionated Posts: 289 Group: Members Member #524 Joined: Feb 4, 2009 Gender Male Religious Views Christian Political View Christian Socialist	This sickens me - it is just an extension of Eugenics that further denies people the dignity of life. This is what Hitler wanted to do, just much earlier and with casualties we feel less guilty about. On the other hand, I can see why it is attractive, but I think that if we aim to cure sicknesses we should do it not by, essentially, killing people, but actually by curing them. puts his right wing hat back on the shelf to collect dust.



Darmoor	Jun 21 2009, 05:35 PM Post #10
Posts: 161 Group: Members Member #426 Joined: Nov 29, 2008 Gender Male Religious Views Atheist	I'm very much for this. I think the next evolutionary push won't be like it used to be. The next big push will be by the hands of man. Just imagine it. You could solve so many problems by designing people to not catch certain diseases. Maybe make them less aggressive, etc. That is assuming we don't fuck something up.. Like letting power hungry people in charge of this.



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