23andMe's Designer Baby Patent
By Dov Fox,
Huffington Post
| 10. 04. 2013
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) this week awarded a patent on "gamete donor selection" to 23andMe, the genetic testing company that sells at-home DNA kits directly to consumers. Patent #8,543,339 grants 23andMe exclusive rights to genetic and computer technologies that would enable prospective parents to handpick a sperm or egg donor with whom they would be likely to produce a child born with certain traits that they desire.
It's not just couples already planning to have a baby together who can use the patented technology to learn the likelihood that their child will inherit certain "phenotypes of interest in the hypothetical offspring." The patent also covers genetic selection from among a broader menu of options by predicting how a person's DNA would combine with any number of available donors to produce a child of a particular type. The patent illustrates:
There's much to be said for 23andMe's mission to empower people with genetic information about themselves and their potential children. What mother or father doesn't want to give his or her child the best chance of leading a...
Related Articles
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...
By Ari Schulman, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the...
By Megan Agnew, The Times | 09.15.2024
Faith Hartley always wanted two girls — a blonde and a redhead. “I thought, I’ll have one that looks like me,” says Hartley, 35, smoothing her golden hair in the Los Angeles valley home she shares with her husband, Neil...