Can you design your own baby

So, over to you. Which will you choose? That book was, of course, Brave New World , published in Set in the year , it describes a society whose population is grown in vats in an impersonal central hatchery, graded into five tiers of different intelligence by chemical treatment of the embryos.

There are no parents as such — families are considered obscene. Brave New World has become the inevitable reference point for all media discussion of new advances in reproductive technology. The spectre of a harsh, impersonal and authoritarian dystopia always looms in these discussions of reproductive control and selection.

But the prospect of genetic portraits of IVF embryos paints a rather different picture. If it happens at all, the aim will be not to engineer societies but to attract consumers.

Should we allow that? Even if we do, would a list of dozens or even hundreds of embryos with diverse yet sketchy genetic endowments be of any use to anyone? Thanks to Crispr-Cas9, it seems likely that gene therapies — eliminating mutant genes that cause some severe, mostly very rare diseases — might finally bear fruit, if they can be shown to be safe for human use.

Clinical trials are now under way. But modified babies? Crispr-Cas9 has already been used to genetically modify nonviable human embryos in China, to see if it is possible in principle — the results were mixed. And Kathy Niakan of the Francis Crick Institute in the UK has been granted a licence by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority HFEA to use Crispr-Cas9 on embryos a few days old to find out more about problems in these early stages of development that can lead to miscarriage and other reproductive problems.

Most countries have not yet legislated on genetic modification in human reproduction, but of those that have, all have banned it. Are we going to create a sort of subpopulation of the genetically perfect as against everybody else? Are parents playing God?

Couples routinely choose the sex of their new baby and are able to carefully screen egg and sperm donors , but many say this advancement takes it too far. Steinberg says that designing your baby is on the verge of becoming reality. The question for parents, doctors, and society is whether this is progress and if they are on board. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Researchers are already breaking ground in this area.

Continue reading to find out how…. The mitochondrial DNA is a structure of cells inherited from mothers, which converts foods into energy for cells.

This technique allows for a third parent to submit their DNA to use in place of a faulty gene that may cause birthing issues or miscarriage. In a Jordanian coupled birthed a baby boy who became the first child to have more than two genetic parents.

While they chose solely based on the number of chromosomes in the embryos, which corresponds to their chance of success, the technique can be tweaked to allow for consideration of genetic mutations. Experts predict that soon, parents will be able to select embryos based on cosmetic and behavioral traits, as well.

For example, parents carrying no green eye genes could engineer their child to have green eyes. It was used to do the first successful gene editing of a human embryo in April , when Chinese researchers modified a gene related to blood disease.

A year later, this was done by a Chinese team for the second time, but for HIV resistance. Both resulted in non-viable embryos, emphasizing the difficulty of human embryo gene editing, and gene editing overall. This is partially because the complexity of biological systems means that editing genes can have many unforeseen effects, especially in humans.

However, germ line gene editing has been successful in other species.