Designer Babies: Human cloning is a long way off, but bioengineered kids are already here. 
        
            By Shannon Brownlee, 
                The Washington Monthly
             | 02. 28. 2002
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            In the mid-1990s, embryologist Jacques Cohen pioneered a promising 
                  new technique for helping infertile women have children. His 
                  technique, known as cytoplasmic transfer, was intended to "rescue" 
                  the eggs of infertile women who had undergone repeated, unsuccessful 
                  attempts at in vitro fertilization, or IVF. It involved injecting 
                  the cytoplasm found inside the eggs of a fertile donor, into 
                  the patient's eggs. 
                  When the first baby conceived through cytoplasmic transfer was 
                  born in 1997, the press instantly hailed Cohen's technique as 
                  yet another technological miracle. But four years later, the 
                  real story has proven somewhat more complicated. Last year, 
                  Cohen and his colleagues at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine 
                  and Science of St. Barnabas, a New Jersey fertility clinic, 
                  set off alarm bells among bioethicists with the publication 
                  of a paper detailing the genetic condition of two the 17 cytoplasmic-transfer 
                  babies born through the clinic to date. The embryologists reported 
                  that they had endowed the children with extra bits of a special 
                  type of genetic material, known as mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, 
                  which came with the cytoplasm transferred from the donor...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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