Designer Babies, Version 1.0

Posted by michael on Wednesday February 27, 2002 @08:36AM from the wait-till-you-see-version-7 dept.

Stickerboy writes: "A 30 year-old woman in Chicago gave birth to a pre-pregnancy genetically screened and selected baby 17 months ago, which is being reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association today. Doctors at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago took 23 eggs from her, screened the eggs for a gene that causes an early form of Alzheimer's, and then fertilized and implanted the eggs back in her womb. Shades of the movie Gattaca - this is a good specific development, but the start of a very controversial trend. Read more about it in the Washington Post or read the abstract in JAMA."

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Re:all they did was screen for alzheimers? by gorillasoft · 2002-02-27 08:41 · Score: 4, Informative

Why didn't they do anything else interesting. If you are going to screen for something, why not go all out?

Read the article - her family had a history of very early alzheimers, where they would be in the full stages of it by age 40. This was an attempt to prevent the 50% likelihood of the offspring having alzheimers by age 40 as well.