Is genetic engineering our future medical solution for disease treatment? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. An article from the SanFransisco Chronicle discussed a fairly new field of medicine known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis. A few doctors in Chicago helped a thirty year old woman get pregnant with a child free of her families curse of early Alzheimer’s disease. She carries the genetic marker and has a 50/50 chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease as well as passing it on to her children. By undergoing hormonal stimulation the doctors were able to retrieve 23 eggs and use molecular tests to identify the eggs free of the genetic mutation. Four fertilized eggs were implanted into the mother.
It’s difficult to count the number of ethical questions that come to mind when reading this article. First, what happens when her daughter is five or maybe ten and her mother has advanced Alzheimer’s disease? Should anyone be able use technology to create a “designer” baby? There is a significantly increased chance that this parent won’t be around to raise her child to adulthood? What if you want to “let nature take it’s course”? Does this mean you are not a good parent? The article mentioned that these sort of advancements ‘just increase the sense of guilt and responsibility on women’. Although this is good news for future baby-makers, it opens the door to those who want to fine tune their embryo in ways that have no link to health or disease. The woman in the article was a geneticist, who was well educated about the risks and possible complications. The question of how science will deal with the need for policy, oversight, and regulation of assisted reproduction and genetic engineering in general is an important one for this decade.
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