Designer babies why is it wrong

Parents can thereby select embryos with certain genes to avoid particular diseases -- or to pick the sex of their future child. Since , when the first child, Louise Brown, was born using in-vitro fertilization, this and other assisted reproductive technologies have expanded immensely, creating over a million babies.

Yet the European Union nations and other industrialized countries closely regulate this industry far more than the United States does. Laws regarding these assisted reproductive technologies vary from country to country, if they exist at all. The underlying idea is that the would-be parents are not buying the eggs themselves -- and treating them as commodities -- but rather just covering the donor's basic expenses.

In contrast, the United States allows people to buy and sell human eggs for much larger sums that can increase with the presumed quality of the eggs themselves. It's the first step toward a cure for humans, they say. US egg sales have become a huge business, with hundreds of donor agencies soliciting young women to sell their eggs in university newspapers advertisements.

Prospective parents now buy eggs online using drop-down menus to choose donors with specific hair and eye color, height, graduate education, hobbies, religion, race and ethnicity and more -- though, of course, purchasers can't be certain which traits the future child will, in fact, inherit from the donor.

Aaron Levine, a professor at Georgia Tech, found that the prices of eggs tend to increase with the donor's college's average SAT scores. Because preimplantation genetic diagnosis allows parents to avoid transmitting mutations to children, CRISPR will unfortunately probably be used to enhance progeny with socially desired traits such as height, certain athletic abilities or intelligence. Such uses will be very profitable. Due to high costs, assisted reproductive technologies, including preimplantation genetic diagnosis, are not available to everyone and are thus altering how thousands of affluent people -- but not poorer individuals -- thrive and live.

Wealthy individuals are eliminating certain lethal mutations from their offspring while the less affluent cannot. C omfortably seated in the fertility clinic with Vivaldi playing softly in the background, you and your partner are brought coffee and a folder. Inside the folder is an embryo menu. Each embryo has a description, something like this:. Embryo 78 — male No serious early onset diseases, but a carrier for phenylketonuria a metabolic malfunction that can cause behavioural and mental disorders.

Higher than average risk of type 2 diabetes and colon cancer. Lower than average risk of asthma and autism. Dark eyes, light brown hair, male pattern baldness.

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? From what we can tell from his presentation, despite various attempts, mosaicism remains a problem in the monkey embryo experiments.

He then translated his microinjection protocol to human embryos. While many strategies for increasing HDR have been reported in cell lines [ 13 ], whether they are applicable in human embryos remains an open question. These scientific debates reveal our incomplete understanding of the DNA-repair mechanisms and outcomes associated with gene editing in human early embryos and suggest that He probably underestimated the rate of mosaicism and the risk of introducing harmful genetic alterations.

To assess mutations caused by off-target editing, He established one human embryonic stem cell hESC line from the edited human embryos. Here, again, the quality of the science is substandard. Only one hESC line was derived from one edited human embryo, which was then used for whole-genome sequencing WGS to detect potential off-target mutations.

Therefore, to identify the true off-target mutations caused by gene editing, multiple hESC lines need to be established from edited and unedited embryos and characterized by deep sequencing and extensive bioinformatic analysis. He further claimed that he performed so-called single cell—based WGS on preimplantation genetic diagnosis PGD samples from 19 edited human blastocysts to assess on-target and off-target editing events, before choosing the ones to transfer into recipients.

Twelve out of nineteen embryos contained WT alleles, indicating the CCR5 gene was not completely edited in these embryos. Importantly, there is no mature and reliable technique for single cell—based WGS to address the off-target mutations [ 16 ].

The whole genome amplification process, which amplifies the single copy of the genome to a large enough quantity for WGS, introduces many artificial mutations [ 16 ]. In addition, mosaicism is a major concern that cannot be addressed by PGD, as we cannot sequence all cells in an embryo [ 17 ].

This means that even if the tested cells are correctly edited, there is still a non-negligible risk that other cells in the embryo remain unedited or carry unwanted mutations that may have unpredictable consequences. Besides the types of insertions, deletions, translocations, and rearrangements, on-target effects include large chromosome deletions, chromosome truncations, and homozygosis of the genome by inter-homology repair.

Currently, no single method could detect all these types of off-target mutations, especially when they occur at a very low frequency. The WGS results suggested that only two different CCR5 alleles existed in these samples, each one represented by approximately half of all sequencing reads.

Yet, because the details of sample collection and data analysis are lacking, we cannot draw a robust conclusion. We strongly suggest that the authorities conduct a thorough examination of all the original data and disclose the facts to the scientific community and general public. In conclusion, based on currently available information, we believe there is no sound scientific reason to perform this type of gene editing on the human germline, and that the behavior of He and his team represents a gross violation of both the Chinese regulations and the consensus reached by the international science community.

We strongly condemn their actions as extremely irresponsible, both scientifically and ethically. We strongly urge the international community of scientists and regulators to initiate a comprehensive discussion as soon as possible to develop the criteria and standards for genome editing in the human germline for reproductive purposes.

After reaching a clear consensus, clear and strict laws need to be passed, implemented, and enforced at an international level.

As for considering future immunity to HIV infection, simply avoiding potential risk of HIV exposure suffices for most people.

Therefore, editing early embryos does not provide benefits for the babies, while posing potentially serious risks on multiple fronts, which we will discuss next. The CCR5 gene encodes a receptor on white blood cells that HIV-1 uses, along with another receptor, to infect human cells. While He claimed that there was a long-term health follow-up plan, there are no details on who will fund this or assume responsibility in the event that any medical issues arise.

This is absurd. It is not possible to answer that question simply by comparing histology staining of four different tissues without any quantification and by doing two simple behavior tests in mice. The quality of the science is very poor and superficial. For example, the data from the novel object investigation behavior test suggested that there was a difference between the wild-type WT and Ccr5 KO mice, although the P value is above 0.

Further evaluation using a larger sample size is necessary before claiming Ccr5 KO did not cause any behavioral phenotype. A cursory literature search would have revealed that CCR5 has normal immune functions as a receptor of chemokines, and CCR5 KO mice have natural killer cell NK -related phenotypes leading to higher risks for various viral infections [ 7 — 9 ].

These are very routine procedures used for gene-editing experiments. NHEJ repair often leads to small insertions or deletions indels , while HDR results in perfect repair or precise genetic modification at the targeted site. Moreover, in-frame indel mutations could potentially generate gain-of-function mutations, the risks of which are even more difficult to predict.

He attempted to optimize the microinjection procedure using monkey zygotes, and performed sequencing to evaluate the gene-editing efficiency and level of mosaicism.

Because his data have not been published on any platform as a research paper, the information shown on PowerPoint slides is insufficient for vetting. From what we can tell from his presentation, despite various attempts, mosaicism remains a problem in the monkey embryo experiments. He then translated his microinjection protocol to human embryos. While many strategies for increasing HDR have been reported in cell lines [ 13 ], whether they are applicable in human embryos remains an open question.

These scientific debates reveal our incomplete understanding of the DNA-repair mechanisms and outcomes associated with gene editing in human early embryos and suggest that He probably underestimated the rate of mosaicism and the risk of introducing harmful genetic alterations.

To assess mutations caused by off-target editing, He established one human embryonic stem cell hESC line from the edited human embryos. Here, again, the quality of the science is substandard.