Nicolas Moy
Dr. Sheila Abraham
BIOL 2633 01
March 2, 2012

DVD Project “Who’s Afraid of Designer Babies? The Ethics of Genetic Screening”

An Australian family with a son diagnosed with a rare disease called “Hyper IGM” which essentially is a congenital condition in which a person is born with a vital piece of his/her immune system missing requiring that they receive constant blood transfusions.
In this case, the couple goes through a PGD procedure making another child with no disease to cure the oldest child. This procedure of PGD to identify a unimpaired embryo

Summary
Leanne and Stephen, the Australian couple are in desperate search for a cure to treat their son, BJ’ fatal disease in which doctors determined that the medical name of BJ’s disease is called “Hyper IGM” which is a rare disease, actually, so rare that 2 out of every million children born are diagnosed with this condition. Using PGD (Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis), doctors who specialize in assisted reproduction helped Leanne and Stephen in the journey to find a solution to their child’s issue. The plan would be to essentially create a “extra-parts baby” by testing for a disease-free and HLA matching embryo. If successful, this would procedure would use the blood tissue from the newborn to cure BJ.
Of course, once this case hit the public ethical debates arise. One very predominant argument was whether by allowing this couple to proceed with this procedure for therapy, this could potentially open doors to allowing the average everyday couple to create a “Designer Baby.”
However, despite the accusations. Leanne and Stephen decided to proceed with the PDG assignment and allow the doctors to take multiple eggs from Leanne and a scemen sample from Stephen to fertilize the eggs into embryos through an in vitro environment for future biopsy testing. Unfortunately, most of these embryos failed and died during fertilization due to instability leaving only four embryos to successfully be fertilized for testing.
These results was not the news Stephen and his wife had hoped for but speaking from their past experiences with more than 35 embryos failing to proceed through testing and a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, this outcome was better than nothing and gave the couple a little bit of hope for success for a cure for their beloved BJ.
Finally, after 6 days of waiting the doctors are finally able to determine the results. Early the morning of the sixth day, doctors found that two of the 4 remaining embryos had died leaving 2 available for final testing. This is the process of elimination with a lot of emotional stress associated for the couple to be under.
After a few more tests for HLA matching, the doctors finally found the cure to BJ’s Hyper IMG disease.
The doctor’s next step is to implant the assisted fertilized embryo back into Leanne’s uterus to proceed with the pregnancy by developing a fetus and eventually giving birth to a baby boy, who will at one point, deliver a cure for his older brother’s Hyper IMG diagnosis.
This brought great joy and relief to Leanne and Stephen, knowing their older son could now be cured of his fatal disease.
How the society (Australia and abroad) reacted to these cases of parents pursuing ARTs to have babies for different reasons? Gender selection? What about the costs involved? What is the success rate of these procedures? How many rounds of IVF did they go through and over how many years? What happened to the embryos created through this process?

Implications/Significance

For many years, embryonic research has been a major medical and ethical debate and has taken many different stands from many different viewpoints over the years as researchers learned more about how the early stages of human development takes place.
One might believe PGD to be a very innocent action to take, but it can lead to temptation to take procedures to the next level thus crossing those moral lines established by our medical and ethical foundations.
Many believe PGD to be a form of Eugenics or at least an action that could very well lead to Eugenics. In particular countries, this is true. And was once even approved by our very own, United States of America as a way of eradicating genetic defects in our society via isolation and prevention of reproduction to form a more fit race of humans with “perfect” genes.
This belief system was originally established in the 1920s by the Nazi-movement who influenced United States and many other counties to do the same.
So due to history’s track record of where Eugenics has taken mankind and the thousands of innocent individuals who were born with such unfortunate fate, today’s generation has every right to be cautious of the medical implications and possibilities followed through PDG procedures and the possibilities of creating newborns with flawless genes, also known as “Designer Babies,” altering the course that nature should take as originally designed by the Creator – to be a natural and random fertilization at conception with and/or without the defects included in the chromosome packaging.
Contrary to the negative arguments proposed by the opponents of PDG, many researchers and doctors have concluded that PDG could be used to benefit medicine in therapeutic uses such as BJ’s case where physicians are selecting specific embryos to treat for fatal disease.
Physicians have also concluded that PDG procedures can be used for enhancement in the human body, specifically pertaining to immunology and making the natural immune system more efficient as a whole, potentially slowing down the aging process and keeping the in-body alert system for viruses and disease at its peak potential for a longer period of time.