Designer Babies

Designer Babies

Adrian Baluyot and Aries Salvador

Subtopics:

        1. What are Designer Babies: Genetic Modification

        2. What Technology do we use?

        3. What physical traits can we design?

        4. We can potentially eliminate inherited diseases.

        5. Is it safe?

1. What are designer babies? Genetic Modification.

        Genetic modification is the manipulation and change of structure to an organisms genetic makeup and material. This technology can be used to alter and improve an organism by changing their genome. Designer babies are brought about buy using genetic modification, by manipulating and altering in today's current genetic engineering technology, adult genes cannot be modified but during early stages of development; embryo genes can be modified. Although many countries for bad this practice some still continue to search and develop this technology. Procedure is done on a germinal tissue level. Designer babies are something new and exciting in the world of science and the whole process is just beginning to develop. Scientists predict that one day through this technology that adult genes can be modified with ease and given genes to assist in fighting or diseases or viruses. Although the majority of testing comes through animals due to the speculated health and development risks on humans, there have been 54 modified embryos in China.

2. What technology do we use?

        In vitro fertilization, is suggested and speculated as on of the core /processes to designer babies. IVF, is the process by which eggs are removed from a. Women's ovaries and then fertilize with the spermicide outside of her body. The newly fertilized egg is allowed to divided and grow for a various amount of days before. Being implanted back in the woman's uterus. Once implanted the egg will develop and grow into a baby. This technology has brought us, "family balancing" which already allows parents to select the desired genes were of the egg and only implant the eggs with the corresponding gender. A new option, Whole Genome Amplification allows for the entire analysis of the whole genome of the embryo. This technology allows us to see the traits of an embryo such as: height, complexion, color for hair and eyes and more physical traits.

3. What physical traits can we design?

        Trait selections is embryonic screening process called Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This process allows us to screen and select which traits we would like to keep I the genetic makeup of the embryo. We do this through in vitro. The traits we can select and modify are: gender and physical appearance. Through in vitro we can select the gender of an embryo, but out technology doesn't yet allow us to fully optimize and select a whole array of choices. For example, we could not jus twist all the physical traits we'd like our baby to possess. In vitro would have to be performed several times and much more for your perfect baby to come out because, we are not capable of selecting height, eye color, hair color, complexion...etc. All these traits can be achieved through several egg removals and PGD screenings to see if an egg has the closest or perfect genetic makeup for us. It is speculated by scientists that, in the near future with the advancement of nanotechnology and IVF, WGA and PGD we will be able to fully customize our embryos the exact way we would like them. In terms of physical appearance that is.  However, it is still phenomenal that we can decide what gender the embryo will be. In the near future, designer babies will be an expensive procedure selected and sought after for various reason other than physical trait selection.

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