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Doctors hope that the child will be able to break a family history of the disease.

The birth could also signal new hope for other families which carry the gene, known to radically increase the chance of developing breast cancer, which kills around 15,000 women in Britain every year.

Doctors at University College Hospital in London used a new test to screen a 27-year-old woman's embryos and specifically select those which did not carry the gene.

The women and her husband went through the procedure because of a high likelihood that they would pass on the inherited susceptibility to the disease.

He is a carrier of the BRCA 1 gene and three generations of his family have been diagnosed with breast cancer while in their twenties, including his mother, sister, cousin and his grandmother.

Women who carry the gene have a between 50 and 80 per cent chance of going on to develop breast cancer at some point in their life.

In the past women who have been identified as carrying the gene have undergone radical operations including to remove...