Preventing disease is a standard goal of medicine.ย But a new technology takes it farther than we normally do by preventing a potential person with a genetic disease from being born at all, George Annas, a bioethicist and health lawyer at Boston University and author of “Genomic Messages,” tells Business Insider.
“It’s an extreme,” Annas says.
The technology, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), can be used in conjunction with in-vitro fertilization to test for genetic disease and genetic predispositions, and can even determine sex โ all before a woman is actually pregnant.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is a procedure in which eggs are taken from a woman’s ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a petri dish. Then one or more fertilized embryos are placed in the woman’s uterus, where one will hopefully implant and grow into a baby.
During the process of IVF, multiple embryos are created in the lab from a couple’s eggs and sperm. Before transferring any embryos to the woman’s uterus, doctors can perform PGD by taking one cell from each embryo and analyzing the DNA for disease-causing mutations.
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‘An extreme’ in action
Today, if a couple affected by Huntington’s disease doesn’t want to risk passing the disease down to a child, they can try to conceive through IVF, using PGD. That special layer of genetic testing, however “extreme” it may seem, changes everything: It can all but ensure they won’t have child who suffers from the disease.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post:ย Genetic testing is taking medicine to an all new extreme
