[Kosh]

Awesome stuff

manoftin writes to tell us that next week a baby will be born without the gene for breast cancer, according to the BBC. "But he said that, in this case, not carrying the BRCA1 gene would not guarantee any daughter born to the couple would be unaffected by breast cancer because there are other genetic and environmental causes. Dr Alan Thornhill, scientific director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre, said: 'While the technology and approach used in this case is fairly routine, it is the first time in the UK that a family has successfully eliminated a mutant breast cancer gene for their child. It is a victory for both the parents and the HFEA that licensed this treatment.'" 

This is the first step to eliminating all kinds of terrible genetic conditions.

[Mars]

Awsome stuff.

Is there any chance of eliminating the wrong gene, however? Causing a mutation that could be worse than the original.

[Black Wolf]

Awesome stuff

manoftin writes to tell us that next week a baby will be born without the gene for breast cancer, according to the BBC. "But he said that, in this case, not carrying the BRCA1 gene would not guarantee any daughter born to the couple would be unaffected by breast cancer because there are other genetic and environmental causes. Dr Alan Thornhill, scientific director of the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre, said: 'While the technology and approach used in this case is fairly routine, it is the first time in the UK that a family has successfully eliminated a mutant breast cancer gene for their child. It is a victory for both the parents and the HFEA that licensed this treatment.'" 

This is the first step to eliminating all kinds of terrible genetic conditions.

And Gattaca! Woo!

[castor]

Awsome stuff.

Is there any chance of eliminating the wrong gene, however? Causing a mutation that could be worse than the original.

I think this is more like abortion due to medical reasons. Just without (or before) the fetus.

[tinfoil]

Awsome stuff.

Is there any chance of eliminating the wrong gene, however? Causing a mutation that could be worse than the original.

you mean like the the movie I Am Legend?

[Mars]

Never seen it >_>

[tinfoil]

well essentially a cure for cancer goes really really bad. the analogy doesn't work if you haven't seen it though.

[Kosh]

It's not like that, they didn't alter anything, they just screened the embryo to make sure it didn't have that particular gene.

[MP-Ryan]

See, this is why I have a genetics degree.  Well, primarily it nicely adds to my resume, but a good secondary bonus is the ability to explain this crap to people =)

Here's what this couple did:
-Mom tested positive for BRCA1, a genetic predisposition to breast cancer.
-Doctors remove several of Mom's eggs and a great deal of Dad's sperm.
-Eggs are individually separated onto growth medium, and fertilized.
-Successful fertilizations are kept and the embryo is allowed to grow to the 8-cell stage; unsuccessful fertilizations are discarded.
-At the 8-cell stage, a single cell is removed from each embryo.
-The cell is digested in a series of chemicals, and a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is run to determine the presence or absence of the BRCA1 gene in each embryo.
-Embryos that tested positive for the BRCA1 gene were destroyed.
-Some (usually 4-6) of the embryos testing negative for BRCA1 are implanted into Mom's uterus while she's given a hefty dose of fertility drugs and hormones.  The remainder are frozen in storage.
-Hopefully, at least one of the embryos implants into the uterine lining, and Mom is now officially pregnant.
-Providing all goes well, Mom gives birth to [a] healthy child[ren] 40 weeks later.

This is IVF (in-vitro fertilization) with genetic screening done to weed out the chance of a particular gene.  It's nothing revolutionary - the technology to do this has existed for nearly two decades (possibly longer, actually).  It's very time consuming and it involves the destruction of a lot of embryos.

This is the short cut to getting pregnant and aborting each pregnancy when it tests positive for the cancer gene.  Instead, you eliminate the chance of a fertilized embryo carrying the gene even implanting into the uterine lining.

It has nothing to do with any the the absolute garbage that movies make the science of genetics out to be.

And this is actually a step BACKWARD in eliminating problematic genetic conditions - rather than seeking an actual solution or gene therapy for people born with the condition, people will merely seek to have designer babies instead.  I don't have much problem with that so long as PGD is restricted to life-threatening conditions, but the potential for abuse of this science is enormous.

[Stormkeeper]

How soon till the first Co-ordinator?

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist, especially not when I saw 'designer babies' in Ryan's post ...

[karajorma]

the potential for abuse of this science is enormous.

Not until the steps you just mentioned get a lot easier though. Right now it's really not worth it just for designer babies. Especially when you consider the discomfort involved with egg donation and the success rate of IVF.

[chief1983]

But even now, with the increased risk that we frak something up, you basically make it ok to terminate the mistakes.  Instead of one aborted natural fetus, you have many aborted clinical fetuses.  If people had a problem with abortion before, can you imagine the flames this is going to cause?  I might be pro-choice, but that doesn't extend so far as to tell people it's ok to try to fine tune life and then kill it when they screw it up.  And I'm not so worried about designer babies as I am about making our gene pool even more stagnant.  We're choosing to halt evolution.  I could see it getting to the point that the equivalent of a jury needs to exist to determine what kind of genetic manipulation should and should not be allowed, so that we have as minimal an effect on our genetic diversity as we possibly can.  Who's to say that many things that might be undesirable traits today won't be the key to the survival of the species tomorrow?  If this kind of modification is to be allowed, it should only be to prevent the most serious of illnesses and afflictions, the rest should be left up to nature.

[Mars]

Didn't we already choose to halt evolution . . . really

[chief1983]

Not so terribly much, we still have maintained a certain level of diversity among the population.  But if everyone can make themselves even more alike, that gets hurt even more, and an environment change on a global scale could wipe us all out.

[Kosh]

And this is actually a step BACKWARD in eliminating problematic genetic conditions - rather than seeking an actual solution or gene therapy for people born with the condition, people will merely seek to have designer babies instead.  I don't have much problem with that so long as PGD is restricted to life-threatening conditions,

Not a clean win, granted. However, what about conditions like down syndrome and muscular dystrophy? They aren't life threatening but they can make your life a living nightmare.

but the potential for abuse of this science is enormou

Which is what regulation is for.

[Mongoose]

Not gonna lie, this sounds pretty damn horrific.  I'm not intent on opening any old cans of worms, though.  Ah, humanity...your endless potential for destroying what makes you you in increasingly inventive ways never ceases to amaze me.

[Martinus]

I probably sound quite nasty in saying this: The lovely thing about it is that the people who get hung up on calling a small number of cells sacrosanct life won't matter. They'll be the ones with the higher mortality rate and less chance of breeding genetically robust offspring.

The level of fear-mongering and pessimistic conjecture associated with work like this is almost humorous.

We are still evolving when our hand guides the path. Who stated that evolution had to happen completely by chance?

[tinfoil]

I'm so, so glad Trashman isn't here to wreak his havoc on this thread.

[karajorma]

But even now, with the increased risk that we frak something up, you basically make it ok to terminate the mistakes.

How? You've lost me there. I fail to see how an time-expensive and costly procedure which is only likely to be used by people who had decided to not have children in the first place in order to prevent them from having horrible inherited conditions is going to screw anything up.

[Mongoose]

I probably sound quite nasty in saying this: The lovely thing about it is that the people who get hung up on calling a small number of cells sacrosanct life won't matter. They'll be the ones with the higher mortality rate and less chance of breeding genetically robust offspring.

Yes, you do sound quite nasty, but no matter...those of us who hold such beliefs tend to wind up having more kids than those who don't, so I suspect it all balances out in the end.

On a more serious note, I don't see it as fear-mongering so much as pointing out a rather glaring (and rather disturbing, at least to me) case of bad ethics going on.  I should think that the phrase "designer babies" would give anyone pause who stops and gives it serious thought.  By selectively weeding out certain traits, are we saying that those who exhibit such traits (for a nice and prominent example, let's say Down's Syndrome) are somehow "unworthy" in some sense, belonging to a prior and inferior class of humanity?  And this sort of technology could easily go so far as to toss around embryos for the sake of getting a baby with the "right" eye color...even without invoking certain Internet laws, that's one of the most callous forms of superficial behavior I can think of. 

And going in an entirely different direction, if we're going to be sticking our hands in a process that's literally taken billions of years to get our genome to where it is today, we'd better be damn sure we know what we're doing beforehand.  What sounds great in theory and initial practice could very well turn out to be disastrous down the road.  It's only been fifty years or so since we discovered just what the molecule is that makes us all tick, and a mere five since we established a rough blueprint of everything that that molecule does.  Maybe before we go bounding off into some magical Brave New World, we should sit down and talk about exactly what that world implies.