EULALEE THOMPSON"IS IT a boy or girl?" It's the question that many new parents are asked over and over again by excited family members and friends. But new gene technology coupled with in vitro fertilisation (IVF) mean that the moments of anticipation can be removed from the birthing process. In this millennium, genetic and fertility scientists have pulled us into the age where babies can be "customised" - these are the "designer babies".
In fact, last August, the first "designer baby", Adam, was born to Lisa and Jack Nash. He was actually "created" to save the life of his six-year old sister Molly. She had a potentially fatal genetic disorder, known as Fanconi anaemia. This disease results in bone marrow failure and sometimes leukaemia.
To fight this disease, the doctors needed to find someone with genetically-matched tissue (usually the match is found in a sibling). The answer was to create Adam. He was "created" by extracting several eggs from his mother, Lisa and then fertilising them in vitro. The fertilised eggs become embryos. The doctors then chose the most compatible and healthy potential donor from among 15 embryos. Baby Adam was the selected embryo, he was implanted in his mother's uterus. When he was born, his umbilical cord stem-cells were used to save his sister's life.
This is the latest frontier of genetic science, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), where scientists can test IVF-produced embryos to detect the ones carrying a genetic disease. In this case, the doctors also performed another test to identify the perfect tissue match for Molly.
There has also been new development in the area of sex-selection. A fertility clinic in Virginia, United States announced recently, a new technique for sorting sperm according to the amount of gender-determining DNA in each sperm. The doctor would then artificially inseminate the woman with a sperm of the desired gender. The accuracy rate in this method of sex-selection is said to be higher than other methods.
These scientific meddlings into the "creation" of life, though they also have the potential help patients with many genetic disorders such as sickle-cell anaemia, are already sparking off debates on whether they are ethical. The debate may not be too far from Jamaica, since the local medical community currently has at its disposal the technology and expertise to perform some of these sophisticated procedures. Dr. Joseph Frederick, University of the West Indies' (UWI's) fertility expert said however that the focus here is to assist infertile couples to have children.
Dr. Derrick Aarons, Jamaica's bioethecist says that the scenario produces an ethical dilemma. He also said that religious and legal issues will have to be resolved.
The scientist, Dr. Aarons said should be doing good to benefit human beings and so if the scientist is doing good to one to harm the other then there is an ethical dilemma. All human beings, according to him, are equal. He also raised the issue of whether a couple should conceive just to produce tissue.
The religious argument, he said, might surround the question of why should people have children, except for the reason ordained by God for procreation.
Legally, Dr. Aarons said, that there are yet no laws written to provide oversight in this area of scientific experimentation but there are certain laws governing human life. If fertilise eggs, then discard them, he opines that the tissue was a human life and the scientist might be deemed to have killed it.
