Designing Your Baby

The technology is in place to order up a child’s physical traits or intellect. The issue is how far we want to take it.
By Scott McCredie for MSN Health & Fitness

It started a decade ago with Dolly the Scottish sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal. Then a year later came Lucy the Canadian mouse, the first mammal with artificially implanted genes that could be inherited by her offspring. Since then, the world has expressed a mixture of confusion, horror and optimism at the potential of genetic engineering to prevent diseases in humans and “enhance” physical or cognitive traits.

So where does this technology stand? Are we any closer to creating so-called “designer babies”?

The technology already exists today for screening out embryos with “lethal” genes, without adding to or changing the genes of a future child. The technique used for this is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Like in vitro fertilization (for infertile couples), it involves removing several eggs from a woman, fertilizing them with the husband’s sperm, and allowing the embryos to grow to several cells each. Then one cell is extracted from each and genetically analyzed. As scientists continue to unravel the code of the human genome, genes associated with other diseases and other traits will be identified. See Complete Article: Designer babies