Special deliveries: Are designer babies arriving? [With video]
By Mike Celizic,
The TODAY Show
| 03. 03. 2009
[Quotes CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
Imagine ordering a baby like dinner: “We’ll take the boy in the Greek-god model, but can you make him 6-foot-4 instead of 6 feet? And gimme the green eyes instead of the blue; ash-blond hair — a little curly, but not too much; olive complexion; 140 IQ; heavy on the fast-twitch muscles.”
Sound like science fiction? Maybe not: The news that a California fertility clinic is offering prospective parents the opportunity to improve the odds of having children with preselected hair, skin and eye color has renewed the debate over “designer babies.” (Story continues below video.)
.msnbcLinks {font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;} .msnbcLinks a {text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px;} .msnbcLinks a:link, .msnbcLinks a:visited {color: #5799db !important;} .msnbcLinks a:hover, .msnbcLinks a:active {color:#CC0000 !important;}
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
But Dr. Jamie Grifo, director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology at the NYU School of Medicine, told TODAY’s Meredith Vieira Tuesday in New York that the...
Related Articles
By Nick Paul Taylor, BioSpace | 03.14.2024
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...
By Daniel Gilbert, The Washington Post | 03.07.2024
Vitaly Kushnir’s fertility clinic offers to screen an embryo to predict a baby’s sex, but the service can lead to ethically murky territory, like when a couple wanted it so their first child could be a boy.
But the couple...
By Manuel Ansede, El País | 03.01.2024
A team of Italian researchers has reached a major scientific milestone, heralding a revolution in the field of medicine. The scientists have succeeded in silencing a gene associated with high cholesterol levels, without the need to modify DNA. In the...
By Anne Rumberger and Marcy Darnovsky, Science for the People | 02.29.2024
Eugenics is widely regarded as a debunked pseudoscience—developed and promoted mostly in Nazi Germany—that fell off the political radar after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. In fact, twentieth century eugenics represented the mainstream science of its day and...