Designer Babies: Human cloning is a long way off, but bioengineered kids are already here.
By Shannon Brownlee,
The Washington Monthly
| 02. 28. 2002
In the mid-1990s, embryologist Jacques Cohen pioneered a promising
new technique for helping infertile women have children. His
technique, known as cytoplasmic transfer, was intended to "rescue"
the eggs of infertile women who had undergone repeated, unsuccessful
attempts at in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It involved injecting
the cytoplasm found inside the eggs of a fertile donor, into
the patient's eggs.
When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was
born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen's technique as
yet another technological miracle. But four years later, the
real story has proven somewhat more complicated. Last year,
Cohen and his colleagues at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine
and Science of St. Barnabas, a New Jersey fertility clinic,
set off alarm bells among bioethicists with the publication
of a paper detailing the genetic condition of two the 17 cytoplasmic-transfer
babies born through the clinic to date. The embryologists reported
that they had endowed the children with extra bits of a special
type of genetic material, known as mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA,
which came with the cytoplasm transferred from the donor...
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Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...