Taming the Wild West

Medicine | Bioethicists want to keep tabs on the practice of making “designer babies” | Lynde Langdon

PGD: An embryologist prepares an embryo to be analyzed for sex determination.

At first, the British government typically only allowed couples to toss out in vitro fertilization embryos if the embryos tested positive for serious childhood illnesses. Recently, it extended the allowance to include embryos with a chance of developing inherited cancer such as breast cancer as adults.

Now, the Sunday Times reports, doctors at the University College Hospital in London are asking the government to allow parents to choose the sex of their child if they have a family history of autism—a non-fatal condition that affects more boys than girls.

Bioethicists and bloggers around the world pounded their keyboards with fury when the United Kingdom announced the new allowances for cancer in May. Since then, journalists around the world have parsed and evaluated every aspect of embryo screening in the United Kingdom, from recently announced scientific advances in genetic testing to the preparation of the application to screen embryos for autism.

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July 15, 2006, Vol. 21, No. 27

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