CGS-authored

Dr. Mark Hughes likes to startle audiences by declaring that sex may become outdated as a means of human reproduction. His field will replace it with technology, he submits.

"It is going to be, 'Sex is just for fun,' " Hughes will tell a crowd. "In vitro fertilization is going to be for making your children."

Hughes is joking - for the most part. But as head of a major embryo-screening company, Genesis Genetics Institute in Detroit, he also makes a compelling business argument that sex is in for some serious competition from assisted reproductive techniques.

By conceiving a child outside the womb, he says, parents gain the power to erase a hereditary disease from their family lineage. His company plucks a single cell from each of the embryos created for clients at in vitro fertilization clinics. After genetic testing of the sample cells, only the embryos found free of the disease gene are implanted to cause a pregnancy.

As the harvest of human genome studies continues, Hughes said, many more diagnostic tests for such genetic vulnerabilities are being developed...