CGS-authored
With designer baby clothes, designer baby toys, it seemed only a matter of time until some fertility clinic began offering designer babies to go with them.
Now a California clinic, already enjoying a reputation for helping parents pick the gender of their next bundle of DNA, claims it can do even more. Want blue eyes? How about curly hair?
Jeff Steinberg, director of Fertility Institutes, said he plans to use the technology — designed to detect diseases and defects in the unborn — to make cosmetic alterations.
Hype or help, the medical ethics community and other fertility specialists are aghast at this brave new world.
“It’s an outrage to my sense of justice that people would rather waste resources on something like this rather than things that really matter,” said John Lantos of Kansas City’s Center for Practical Bioethics. “It’s frivolous, not necessarily unethical. It’s a vast waste of resources at a time health-care resources are scarce.”
Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, the technology that could make trait selection possible, calls the whole idea “absurd.”
“I went...
Now a California clinic, already enjoying a reputation for helping parents pick the gender of their next bundle of DNA, claims it can do even more. Want blue eyes? How about curly hair?
Jeff Steinberg, director of Fertility Institutes, said he plans to use the technology — designed to detect diseases and defects in the unborn — to make cosmetic alterations.
Hype or help, the medical ethics community and other fertility specialists are aghast at this brave new world.
“It’s an outrage to my sense of justice that people would rather waste resources on something like this rather than things that really matter,” said John Lantos of Kansas City’s Center for Practical Bioethics. “It’s frivolous, not necessarily unethical. It’s a vast waste of resources at a time health-care resources are scarce.”
Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, the technology that could make trait selection possible, calls the whole idea “absurd.”
“I went...