How can designer babies be made

Advocates like Smith want to change the genetic makeup of embryos to prevent the transmission of gene-related diseases.

However, the practice is hugely controversial due to fears that it could be used to create "designer babies" whose genes have been edited for non-therapeutic purposes. In November Chinese scientist He Jiankui sparked outrage after announcing he had created the first genetically-modified babies in the world from embryos altered to make them resistant to HIV. Read More. The most common worry is so-called non-target effects, in which the genetic modification is made, but other unintended edit s occur in other locations in the genome.

Having a modification at the wrong place can cause all kinds of developmental problems, such as abnormal organ development, miscarriage and even cancers. It is also not clear from the results He has shared so far whether this genetic change can be transmitted to the next generation.

Another common problem already alluded to is mosaicism, which appears to have happened in one of these twins. If some cells are edited, and some not, the baby might have liver cells that contain the edited gene and heart cells that have the normal version, for instance. This may or may not lead to serious issues. This sometimes occurs with routine procedures such as in vitro fertilization when there is no attempt to make genetic modifications.

Fortunately, nature is quite good at weeding out abnormal embryos via embryonic death and spontaneous abortion. Even in healthy human populations reproducing normally, nearly half of embryos die before the woman even knows that she was pregnant. While I have emphasized what can go wrong, I believe that the science will evolve such that genetically modified babies will be healthier than unmodified ones.

And these improvements will be passed on to future generations. Severely debilitating genetic abnormalities such as Tay-Sachs syndrome could be removed from a family by genetic modification. Arguably, designer babies are already being born using a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnoses PGD. Dark eyes, light brown hair, male pattern baldness.

So, over to you. Which will you choose? That book was, of course, Brave New World , published in Set in the year , it describes a society whose population is grown in vats in an impersonal central hatchery, graded into five tiers of different intelligence by chemical treatment of the embryos.

There are no parents as such — families are considered obscene. Brave New World has become the inevitable reference point for all media discussion of new advances in reproductive technology. The spectre of a harsh, impersonal and authoritarian dystopia always looms in these discussions of reproductive control and selection.

But the prospect of genetic portraits of IVF embryos paints a rather different picture. If it happens at all, the aim will be not to engineer societies but to attract consumers. Should we allow that? Even if we do, would a list of dozens or even hundreds of embryos with diverse yet sketchy genetic endowments be of any use to anyone? Thanks to Crispr-Cas9, it seems likely that gene therapies — eliminating mutant genes that cause some severe, mostly very rare diseases — might finally bear fruit, if they can be shown to be safe for human use.

Clinical trials are now under way. But modified babies? Crispr-Cas9 has already been used to genetically modify nonviable human embryos in China, to see if it is possible in principle — the results were mixed. And Kathy Niakan of the Francis Crick Institute in the UK has been granted a licence by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority HFEA to use Crispr-Cas9 on embryos a few days old to find out more about problems in these early stages of development that can lead to miscarriage and other reproductive problems.

This has sparked various debates on the ethics of genetic manipulation and the future of genetics. The term 'designer baby' refers to a baby that has been given special traits through genetic engineering. This is done by altering the genes of the egg, sperm, or the embryo. These traits can, in theory, vary from lower resistance to diseases to even gender selection.

Genetic editing is the process of making changes to the genetic code DNA. In the case of 'designer babies,' this is done either by removing small sections of the existing genome or by introducing new segments of DNA into the genome. A new technique, called CRISPR clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats has allowed scientists to cheaply and very rapidly alter the genome of almost any organism.

Genetic editing in humans is a controversial topic, but not all forms of human genetic manipulation are in question. For example, CRISPR could be used to alter cells in the bodies' immune system in order to target and destroy cancer cells or to replace the genes that cause sickle cell anemia with non-sickle cell genes.

CRISPR is a tool with immense potential to create better crops and livestock, manufacture new drugs, eliminate pests, and treat critical illnesses. But the problem arises when there are no limits. Gene-editing can be performed on both somatic cells and germ stem cells, and both these cell types offer very different results. Somatic cells are those cells that have already differentiated into a specific type of cell, like a liver cell or a lung cell.