Does the birth of a baby lacking a cancer-causing gene mean we're on a slippery slope to designer children?
January 2009 began with the birth of a baby girl at a London hospital. Her parents had undergone a form of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which meant that, unlike the father’s family, the baby was free of a breast cancer-causing mutation that had plagued the women of his family for generations.
This is exciting news.
Every woman across three generations of the father’s family had previously been diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, many in their 20s. Tests had shown that the family carried a faulty copy of the BRCA1 ‘high-risk’ breast cancer gene.
Although BRCA1 mutations are rare in the population as a whole, between five and eight out of ten carriers of this gene fault will go on to develop breast cancer, often at a young age (compared to an overall risk of one-in-nine of the general population). And, as is often the case with early-onset breast cancer, BRCA1 tumours will often be extremely aggressive.
So the couple took the decision to use the latest technology to ensure that their baby didn’t carry the BRCA1 fault – a mutation that the couple described as ‘like having the Sword of Damocles hanging over the family’. And, thanks to the help of the private Assisted Conception Unit at London’s UCL Hospital, they gave birth to a healthy, BRCA1-mutation-free baby on January 9th.
As with all advances in reproductive technology, this caused controversy in the media and the inevitable invocation of the ‘designer baby’ cliché – a loaded phrase that simultaneously draws on imagery of over-accessorised parents and Frankenstein-esque forbidden knowledge.
But is it really a ’slippery slope’ from here to choosing hair or eye colour, or even intelligence, as critics claim? Or is this an exciting advance for a small minority of people who live in the shadow of an inherited risk of disease?
Posted by Henry Scowcroft 
Posted by Jon Spiers 
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