A genetically altered human embryo from the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center has people proclaiming that it’s only the first step toward creating designer babies. If you don’t know, designer babies are babies that have been genetically altered to have traits we find particularly pleasing/beneficial, such as athletic ability, intelligence, good looks, etc. We’re sure you know what we’re referring to if you’ve seen the movie Gattaca. Current medicine is unable to design babies but some fear the process will be possible in the near future. Regardless, the fact of the matter is this embryo is not a designer baby nor could it ever have been a baby.

The embryo used in the center’s research study had extra chromosomes making it abnormal and unviable, i.e. it couldn’t have become a baby. The study entailed injecting the embryo with a genetic marker in order to see if the embryo picked the gene up.

The goal was to see if a gene introduced into an abnormal embryo could be traced in stem cells that are harvested from the embryo, he said. Such work could help shed light on why abnormal embryos fail to develop, he said.

In addition, no stem cells were harvested from the embryo as abnormal embryos do not create enough to be harvested. The reason people fear the creation of designer babies if because they would contain traits that are ideal in a person, resulting in the person getting preferential treatment, while everyone else is left in the dust. Basically, you should just watch “Gattaca”. It’s an awesome movie even if you’re not interested in the designer baby debate.

Luckily for these people, the ability to create designer babies is impossible…at the moment.

“Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said she’s not troubled by the work. She said the idea of successfully modifying babies by inserting genes remains a technically daunting challenge.
“We’re not even close to having that technology in hand to be able to do it right,” she said, and it would be ethically unacceptable to try it when it’s unsafe.”

We’re sure there’s some organization out there that is going to try and make a bigger deal out of this. In the mean time, we’ll wait and see how this pans out.

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