Welcome To Gattaca

A stunning breakthrough in biotechnology was announced this week that brings humanity closer to an Orwellian prospect: parents being able to choose the characteristics of an unborn child.

For the first time, scientists have mapped the DNA of a fetus. They did so by using specimens from a pregnant woman and the father. The procedure may make it easier someday to prenatally change genes seen as causing diseases or, more startling, pick a child’s attributes such as eye color or even intelligence.

This achievement by researchers at the University of Washington raises anew many legal, ethical, and moral concerns about the potential for “designer babies.” Yet at a deeper level, such advances in the human mastery of the reproductive process also stir up questions about what is “natural” – or rather, whether “natural selection” will, or should, become “deliberate selection.”

Source: The Christian Science Monitor (http://s.tt/1dKZg)

My son is not a genetic ‘fault’ — the downside of prenatal genetic testing

The “Gattaca” test is almost here. When I say “Gattaca” I’m referring to the 1997 movie starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. In the film, according to IMDB, “A genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel.”

Of course, I am not concerned with space travel but I am concerned with genetics and genetic testing. Here’s why: News outlets reported this week that researchers have successfully genetically mapped a 18-week unborn child by taking a blood sample from the mother and a saliva sample by the father. Scientists are predicting that soon widespread use of prenatal genetic testing will make such tests a routine procedure in doctor’s offices, resulting in the identification of 3,500 potential genetic “faults” in an unborn child.

I have a child who has a genetic “fault” – as these scientists would classify it, and he is the light of my life. Gunner is a happy and rambunctious three-year-old with cystic fibrosis. Through all of his doctor appointments and tests, he is patient and kind and loving and is an incredible example to myself and anyone who gets to know him.

Mapping the entire genetic code of their unborn child will allow parents not only know the sex, eye color, hair color of their baby but also their child’s likelihood to develop certain cancers and diseases and whether or not the child possesses genetic disabilities.

While the hopes of those advocating prenatal testing see this as a bright spot for mankind’s future, those of us whose lives have been touched by someone with one of these genetic “faults” see it as another form of discrimination and extermination.

If abortion clinics will kill an unborn baby simply because it’s a girl, as Live Action has so pointedly uncovered in recent weeks, what will stop them from making money off of aborting children with genetic faults?

Already today in our society, OB/GYNs fearful of “wrongful birth” lawsuits push at each visit for a pregnant mother to obtain all of the prenatal tests currently available – for trisomy’s (Down syndrome, trisomy 18, trisomy 13) and cystic fibrosis. Then, if a test is positive, abortion is advised as the only option – in medical schools, students are being taught that abortion is the ethical option in these cases.

New Test opens “Pandora’s Box”

By Dave Andrusko

We’ve written two stories about a very important topic—a new noninvasive procedure that may allow women someday to test their unborn babies for more than 3,500 genetic disorders. Needless to add, there are ethical concerns galore in opening this “Pandora’s Box,” as NPR’s Rob Stein described it.

The research, published in the journal “Science Translational Medicine,” draws on a relatively new discovery that there is DNA from the baby that circulates in the mother’s blood. So the trick is to find a way to extract and analyze that DNA. It turned out that this could be done by taking blood from the mother and saliva from the father.

The lead scientist, Dr Jay Shendure, said, “This work opens up the possibility that we will be able to scan the whole genome of the fetus for more than 3,000 single-gene disorders through a single, non-invasive test.” How far off this maybe is speculation, but they seem to think within five years, others much further down the line.

What I didn’t think about until I read about a story on NPR’s website today is that this is building on something that is already  available on the market and about which we have written several times.

Within the last couple of years “there have been other tests,” according to Stein, “that also take advantage of the fact that there’s DNA circulating from the fetus in a mother’s blood.” These tests are much more specific, he explained.

“They don’t analyze the entire genome,” Stein told NPR’s Audie Cornish. “They don’t spell out every single letter in the genetic code. They look for very specific variations, usually things like Down syndrome and conditions related to that.”

Put another way, the same search-and-destroy test that potentially targets babies with Down syndrome will someday be available to find some 3,500 genetic disorders.

Cornish and Stein had this most revealing concluding exchange

“CORNISH: And so what have been the concerns people have raised about ethics?

“STEIN: Yes. The tests that have come on the market in the last year or two, they’re now considered pretty reliable, but they still need to be confirmed by follow-up tests if there’s a positive result. The concern there is that maybe some people would get frightened and act prematurely and terminate the pregnancy without getting that confirmatory result.

“Other people are worried about just the whole idea of terminating a pregnancy with, let’s say, a Down syndrome baby. There’s a lot of concern that people don’t really understand Down syndrome, that it’s – people can live full lives with Down syndrome and any – of course, anything that involves terminating a pregnancy is always controversial because that involves abortion, of course.

“CORNISH: And can this also lead to parents also picking out the traits they want in a child?

“STEIN: Right, right. That’s the theoretical possibility that some day down the road, this can open up a real Pandora’s Box of all kinds of moral and ethical problems. If you can scan the genetic code of a fetus for Down syndrome, for example, could you some day scan the genetic code for a gene that makes somebody a good athlete or give somebody blue eyes or makes them tall or short or be smart?

“Now, none of that is possible anytime soon, but theoretically, some day, it might be possible and, if so, that raises all sorts of possibilities, including that we might create, some day, this ‘Gattaca’ world where you can pick and choose the traits of your child to try to create the perfect baby, what they call a designer baby.”