Designing Your Babies - Future Genetics

Designer babies: Future Predictions

In Future, Advanced reproductive technologies (InVitro Fertilisation) and many more will allow parents and doctors to screen embryos for genetic disorders and select healthy embryos.

The fear is that in the future we may be able to use genetic technologies to modify embryos and choose desirable or cosmetic characteristics. Designer babies is a term used by journalists to describe this frightening scenario. It is not a term used by scientists.

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).

Recently scientists have made rapid advances in our knowledge of the human genome and in our ability to modify and change genes. In the future we may be able to "cure" genetic diseases in embryos by replacing faulty sections of DNA with healthy DNA. This is called germ line therapy and is carried out on an egg, sperm or a tiny fertilised embryo. Such therapy has successfully been done on animal embryos but at present it is illegal to do this in humans.

However, it is legal to modify the faulty genes in the cells of a grown child or an adult to cure diseases like cystic fibrosis - this is called body cell gene therapy.The power to change the shape and destiny of the human species - to design babies to order - will be within the grasp of genetic scientists in just a couple of decades. This Technique outlines how science, and the ethical laws constraining it, already permit human embryos to be scanned for a variety of recognised genetic disorders. This can then prevent seriously ill children being born into often short and painful lives. In vitro-fertilisation advances, for example, mean that where families have a history of genetic disorders, an individual cell can be taken from their embryos developed in a laboratory. That cell's genetic material can be tested to see if it is disease-free before the embryo is implanted in the mother's uterus.

There are two types of moral or ethical questions one can ask about designer babies. The first addresses the specific technologies that might be used to modify or select a baby’s genetic makeup. The second question looks away from technological details to focus on the very idea of a designer baby.

Is Genetic Modification technology safe and ethical ??

Are the technologies of genetic modification and selection safe enough to be used on humans? Even if the technologies are safe, can they be morally defended? The Oxford English Dictionary definition describes the way of making designer babies that at the same time is the most conceptually straightforward and raises the biggest concerns about safety. One way to make a designer baby begins with an embryo created by in vitro fertilization (IVF). Genetic engineers modify the embryo’s DNA and then introduce it into a womb.

Geneticists have enhanced learning in mice

Farmers in many parts of the world now plant crops with genomes altered to make them resistant to pests or herbicides. Recent discoveries about the influence of genes on human traits such as susceptibility to disease, shyness, and athletic ability open the possibility of transferring these techniques to human beings. An experiment on mice performed at Princeton University suggests one way this might be done. Geneticists introduced into mouse genomes an additional copy of a gene, NR2B, that codes for one type of glutamate receptor and is known to play a role in the development of the brain. The resulting “doogie” mice, named for the teen genius central character of the early 1990s TV show “Doogie Howser, MD,” seem to learn faster than other mice and retain information longer. The NR2B gene exists in humans, prompting speculation about performing the same trick on one of us. Before this is done, we need to examine pressing safety concerns.

Safety Concerns about this Technology :

Current techniques of genetic modification introduce genes at random places in the genome. We should be concerned about the possibility that an inserted copy of NR2B may arrive in the target genome in a way that disrupts the function of another gene crucial for survival. Many genes have more than one effect. The effect we intend may be accompanied by others of which we become aware only later. There is evidence for such effects on doogie mice, which seem not only to have improved powers of learning and memory, but also to have a greater sensitivity to pain, an enhancement of more dubious desirability. Many of the traits that we may want to select are influenced by multiple genes. A gene affects intelligence only in combination with other genes. We are unlikely to find single genes whose modification would reliably produce a 20-point boost in IQ, for example. We should expand on the dictionary definition to consider other ways of selecting our children’s characteristics. These ways of making designer babies will avoid some of the risks inherent in the genetic modification of human embryos while introducing others. One technology is preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), currently used by some people at risk of passing serious genetic disorders on to their children. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis is already used to screen for genetic defects. People who use preimplantation genetic diagnosis to avoid passing on a disease to their child have a collection of embryos created for them by IVF. These embryos are grown to the eight-cell stage, at which point one or two cells are removed and checked for genetic variants associated with the disease. Only embryos lacking these variants are introduced into the womb.

This Mind blowing technology however has raised a lot of disputes and constrasting moral and scientific arguements among the various sects of Scientists & religious people.

IS IT AGAINST GOD ?? WILL ALL THIS GIVE WAY TO A NEW HUMAN RACE WHO IS FAR SUPERIOR THAN THAN THE PRESENT RACE TODAY !! ARE WE PAVING WAY FOR OUR OWN DESTRUCTION ?? SHARE YOUR COMMENTS