Designer Baby Given Go-ahead

An anonymous reader writes "A couple in the Australian city of Melbourne has been given the legal go ahead to breed a genetically modified 'designer' baby to cure their terminally ill child."

Not quite

[Henry V .009]

Screened, not modified.

Genetic screening ... not modification

[bigsteve@dstc]

The summary of the this Slashdot posting is misleading. It is absolutely clear from the Melbourne Age article that this is not genetic modification. For example, it says:

It is believed to be the first time in Australia that approval has been granted to use IVF in combination with genetic screening and tissue matching to create a "donor" child for a sick sibling.

Far from the first one

[upper]

This has been going on for several years in the US. The first baby selected this way -- at least for Fanconi anemia -- was born in August or Sept 2000. I believe there have been several dozen such selected-sibling transplants since. More info here [hsg.org], here [umass.edu], and here [google.com].

And, as others have noted, calling this a "designer baby" is very misleading. The embryos are created by letting normal sperm and egg cells do their normal thing, only in glassware, and the embryos aren't modified afterwards. The lab work is to decide which embryos would be implanted, so that the resulting child (1) won't have Fanconi anemia, and (2) can be a marrow donor for the sick older sibling. (1) is pretty common now for parents who carry serious genetic diseases and know it.

Re:Far from the first one

[quintessent]

I read about a similar case in the UK about a month ago. There, the country's high court upheld a ruling that stopped the couple from using genetic selection to make a child capable of giving another child a bone marrow transplant.