Page 28 - ARUBA TODAY

A28 SCIENCE
Tuesday 24 april 2018

Parenting of the future: Many embryos, each with DNA profile

By MALCOLM RITTER come a powerful infertility decoded and analyzed to witting celebrity into a ge- fertility clinics do that. They
AP Science Writer treatment, permitting ge- reveal genetic predisposi- netic parent. didn't reveal why, Hudgins
NEW YORK (AP) — So you netic parenthood for peo- tions, both for disease and It is a long way in the fu- said.
want to have a baby. ple who can't make their personal traits. The man ture, but real life is already Hudgins, who's president
Would you like a dark- of the American College
haired girl with a high risk of Medical Genetics and
of someday getting co- Genomics, said no national
lon cancer, but a good medical association has
chance of above-average endorsed decoding all the
music ability? DNA of an embryo, which
Or would you prefer a girl is called its genome. So she
with a good prospect for believes no insurance com-
high SAT scores and a good pany would pay for that
shot at being athletic, but now.
who also is likely to run an ___
above-average risk of bi- 'EASY' PRENATAL DIAGNO-
polar disorder and lupus as SIS
an adult? Greely, who lays out his
How about a boy with a ideas in a book called "The
good shot at having mu- End of Sex and the Future
sical ability and dodg- of Human Reproduction,"
ing asthma, but who also calls his vision "easy PGD,"
would be predisposed to or prenatal genetic diag-
cataracts and type 2 dia- nosis.
betes? Ordinary PGD has been
Confused? You're just get- done for decades. When
ting started. There are doz- a couple is known to be at
ens more choices for which This undated microscope image provided by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in risk for having a child with
of your embryos should be January 2018 shows a trophectoderm biopsy, in which cells from the outer layer of an embryo that a specific genetic disorder,
placed in the womb to be- develop into the placenta and amniotic membranes are removed and can be used for genetic such as cystic fibrosis or sick-
come your child. testing. le cell anemia, the woman
That's the future a biomedi- Associated Press undergoes a procedure to
cal ethics expert envisions remove some eggs. After
for 20 to 40 years from now own sperm or eggs. and woman would get creeping toward it. Some fertilization, some cells are
— soon enough that to- It also would mean that a dossiers on the embryos scientists are trying to make plucked from the embryos
day's children may face it woman who wants to get that pass minimum tests for human eggs and sperm in and examined to identify
when they start their own pregnant could produce suitability. the lab. They are working those without carry the dis-
families. dozens more eggs per at- Out of, say, 80 suitable em- with "iPS cells," which are or- ease-causing abnormality.
"The majority of babies of tempt than with the current bryos, the couple would dinary body cells that have That procedure looks for
people who have good procedure of harvesting then choose one or two to been morphed into a mal- a specific problem in a
health coverage will be some from her ovaries. implant. leable state. few embryos, not entire
conceived this way," pre- And that means a lot of The possibilities don't stop Amander Clark of the Uni- genomes from dozens of
dicts Henry Greely, a Stan- choices. there. The technology versity of California, Los them. If a couple wants
ford University law professor ___ might also help open the Angeles, says her goal is to select a "super baby,"
who works in bioethics. AN ARRAY OF EMBRYOS door to same-sex couples to aid basic research into says Dr. Richard Scott Jr., a
You've probably read Here's what Greely envi- having children genetically why some people are in- founding partner of Repro-
about concerns over "de- sions: A man and woman related to both of them, fertile. She acknowledges ductive Medicine Associ-
signer babies," whose DNA walk into a fertility clinic. though the additional twist the technique might itself ates of New Jersey, "we tell
is shaped by gene editing. The man drops off some of making eggs from men be used to treat some infer- them we can't do it."
Greely is focused on a dif- sperm. The woman leaves or sperm from women tility, particularly in young In fact, Scott and others
ferent technology that has some skin cells, which are would be a huge biologi- people made sterile by say, even wide-ranging
gotten much less atten- turned into eggs and fertil- cal challenge. cancer treatments. analysis would not provide
tion: In a startling bit of bio- ized with the man's sperm. More worrisome is the As for decoding the com- a precise forecast of how a
logical alchemy, scientists Unlike in vitro fertilization to- so-called Brad Pitt sce- plete DNA library of embry- child will turn out.
have shown that in mice, day, which typically yields nario: We all shed a bit of os, Dr. Louanne Hudgins, If DNA is the hardware,
they can turn ordinary cells around eight eggs per try, sloughed-off DNA every who studies prenatal ge- there's also the software:
into sperm and eggs. the new method could re- day, like on the lip of a cof- netic screening and diag- chemical modifications
It's too soon to know if it sult in 100 embryos. fee cup. Such discarded nosis at Stanford, says some that determine when and
could be done in people. The embryos' complete material could be secretly pregnant patients there where particular genes turn
But if it can, it could be- library of DNA would be snatched up to turn an un- say they've already had on and off. Much of this
"epigenome" would devel-
op after an embryo's genes
are sampled, Scott said.
"Your child may not turn
out to be the three-sport
All-American at Stanford,"
because "the epigenome
didn't work out," Scott said.
And a person's upbringing
and life experiences have
a big effect.
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