Researchers analysed thousands of laboratory-made plasmids and discovered that nearly half of them had defects, raising questions of experimental reproducibility.
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The future of baby-making is not in a bed, or in the back seat of a car. It's in a lab. So says Stanford Law Professor Hank Greely,an expert on the intersection of ethical, legal, and social issues in the biosciences.
On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Greely talks with Kishore Hari about the technology and ethics of embryo selection and a brave new world in which embryos are created from skin cells. While the idea of conceiving a child in a clinic may seem "deeply unromantic," as Hari points out, Greely says it could have immense benefits. His book on the subject, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction, is out now.
In the not-too-distant future, parents will be able to see a selection of embryos and pick the one they want based on its genetic traits, Greely says. This ability could eliminate the possibility that a baby will be born with a terminal disease such as Tay-Sachs, which destroys brain function and leads to death in childhood. The technology, he...