Embryo Selection May Help Prevent Some Inherited Disorders

U.S.News published an article about a 27-year- old woman who was planning on having a baby using in vitro fertilization but ran into some difficult decisions along the way. She quickly found out that she was a carrier for Gerstmass-Straussler-Sheinker (GSS) syndrome. GSS is a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disorder usually resulting in premature death. After the eggs from the woman had become fertilized, the doctors took a single cell from the embryo to look and test the DNA to find out which embryos had the mutated DNA and which embryos did not.  By testing for diseases such as GSS, Christine Metz, director of Maternal-Fetal Medicine Research at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, hopes to improve human health over several generations by reducing the transmission of several heredity disorders.Christine Metz discuses how more and more parents are trying to prevent heredity disorders and are starting wonder about tailoring to their future babies.

As of right now, only single-gene disorders are able to be identified; after being identified parents can then choose to allow or prevent heredity disorders.  As to tailoring to babies, this is still a long ways away. All parents want their children to be smart and successful, but genes responsible for a trait such as intelligence is scattered and involves many genes.

So what happens when genes such as intelligence can easily be identified? In vitro fertilization is one of the many "miracles" from modern day scientific technology, but where is the line of what is right and what is wrong? What is the definition of normal vs. diseased? These are all questions we need to ask ourselves as technology becomes more advanced.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Strokes provides great information about GSS and other neurological disorders.