Genetic Engineering Klausur

Embryo genetic screening controversial - and successful

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

A "slippery slope" to "a world of eugenics," as bioethics authorities once worried, or a healthy life for a teenage girl?

Once at the center of a science controversy, Molly Nash, 15, represents the human answer to the debate over a genetic screening technique, " pre-implantation genetic diagnosis," (PGD) that made headlines a decade ago.

In Molly's case, her mother and father turned to PGD to pick out the embryo implanted to give birth to her brother, Adam, in an effort to save Molly's life.

"She's a typical teenage girl, she loves to dance, loves the theater," says nurse Lisa Nash of Denver, Molly's mom. "We never thought she would live to see 15."

A bone marrow transplant in 2000 cured Molly of "Fanconi´s Anemia", a rare illness that kills many of its victims before the age of 7. The cord blood cells transplanted into Molly came from her then newborn brother, Adam. Now 9, Adam was the first reported case of baby selected as an embryo in a fertility lab for birth because his immune system characteristics made him an ideal transplant candidate for his sister. For the Nashes, giving birth to another child with those matching characteristics offered the only chance to save their daughter.

"Adam knows he helped his sister, that's all. They're normal kids," says Lisa Nash.

Of all the corners of science, fertility procedures have one of the longest track records for stirring controversy. In 1978, the delivery of the first "test tube" baby, Louise Brown, in the United Kingdom gave birth to arguments that such procedures would harm children. Similarly, Adam Nash's birth raised worries at the 2002 President's Council on Bioethics meeting that pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) would lead to a widespread era of sex selection procedures at fertility clinics.

In particular, council members worried that embryos would be destroyed as families resorted to fertility clinic screening techniques to check embryos for hereditary diseases. In PGD, an embryologist plucks one or two cells from a few-day-old embryo, and destroys those cells in assays for Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, childhood cancer and many other ailments. In 2007, the most recently-available statistical year, about 5% of the 132,745 U.S. in-vitro-fertilization procedures included PGD, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

"Parents are coming to us from all over the world with many kinds of rare genetic diseases," says Oleg Verlinsky of the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, which did the immune system screening on Adam Nash before his birth. Since then, RGI has performed more than 250 such screenings, Verlinsky says, for children whose birth led to the treatment of an older sibling.

"Molly Nash is a wonderful story," Verlinsky says. "We worked so hard on her assay. The little girl was dying. Most patients come to us just for screening, but cases where parents come to you with an already-sick child are very hard."

Some bioethicists, such as former bioethics council chiefLeon Kass of the American Enterprise Institute, raised worries that children born from such procedures would feel unloved, if they see themselves as exploited. The council also asked the public to weigh concerns about an era of "designer babies" arriving trhough such techniques. The history of eugenics, where 30 U.S. states passed mandatory sterilization laws during the 1920's, in a bid to weed out the "unfit," hung heavily over the debate.

"People are certainly entitled to their opinions. But we were doing what was best for our family," says Lisa Nash. She has become an advocate for cord-blood banking from newborns as a result of her experience. "I'd urge people to really think about it early in their pregnancy."

Tasks:

1.Explain why the case of Molly Nash raised concern at the Council on Bioethics and point out what was done to save her life. (Comprehension)

2.Analyse how the article influences the reader´s opinion on PGD.(Analysis)

3.Do you think PGD ist good if it can save the life of a child? Write an argumentation about this topic.(Evaluation)