Sei sulla pagina 1di 2

Wall Street Journal

Oct 4, 2013, p. A.3


Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright
owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. All rights
reserved.
New Advance Toward 'Designer Babies'
By Gautam Naik

A personal-genomics company in California has been awarded a broad U.S. patent for a
technique that could be used in a fertility clinic to create babies with selected traits, as
the frontiers of genetic enhancement continue to advance.
The patented process from 23andMe, whose main business is collecting DNA from
customers and analyzing it to provide information about health and ancestry, could be
employed to match the genetic profile of a would-be parent to that of donor sperm or
eggs. In theory, this could lead to the advent of "designer babies," a controversial idea
where genes would be selected to boost the chances of a child having certain physical
attributes, such as a particular eye or hair color.
The technique potentially could also be used to create healthier babies, by screening
out donors with genes that are predisposed to disease, either on their own, or in
combination with the recipient's genes.
The awarding of the patent "is a massive addition to what is currently being done" in
fertility clinics, said Sigrid Sterckx of the Bioethics Institute Ghent in Belgium, who cowrote a commentary on the 23andMe patent in the journal Genetics in Medicine on
Thursday. "It indicates a different attitude, not just about disease-related traits, but nondisease traits."
23andMe, based in Mountain View, Calif., says that while its new patent encompasses
trait selection in babies, through a tool called the Family Traits Inheritance Calculator, it
has no plans to apply it to that end. Instead, 23andMe said, the tool offers customers "a
fun way to look at such things as what eye color their child might have or if their child
will be able to perceive bitter taste or be lactose tolerant."
A spokeswoman for 23andMe, Catherine Afarian, said in an emailed response: "When
the patent was first filed nearly five years ago, there was some thinking that this feature
could have potential applications for fertility clinics where the donor selection process
was typically based on photos, family history, and some limited genetic testing of
donors -- much of this has evolved in the past five years." But 23andMe "never pursued
the idea and has no plans to do so," she said. 23andMe was co-founded in 2006 by Anne
Wojcicki, who recently separated from her husband, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Inc.

The prospect of real designer babies -- where it would be possible to reliably choose
cosmetic traits such as complexion and hair color or even physical characteristics such
as athleticism -- remains a distant one. But that day may be drawing closer, thanks to
advances in genetic technology.
Some people say it is unethical to bioengineer children because better-off parents could
use it to give their children a competitive edge, widening societal divisions. But others
say there is nothing wrong with genetic enhancement; parents, they argue, should be
free to endow their kids with the best start in life.
23andMe's patent describes how a patient would first specify certain traits that he or
she wants in a child. Based on the patient's own genetic profile, a computerized system
then "performs inheritance calculations pertaining to the [traits] of interest and
identifies one or more preferred donors for the recipient," the patent states.
A chart accompanying the patent describes the outlines of such a system, whereby the
recipient can choose a child with a low risk of colorectal cancer, say, along with a high
probability of green eyes. For this to work, the genetic profiles of both recipient and
donor would have to be known.
"Test tube babies were seen as an abomination [initially] but today they are routine and
boring," said Jacob Sherkow, an expert on biotechnology patents at Stanford University's
law school. In the same way, he added, 23andMe's patent "is a shot across the bow -- a
signal to the world that this is what the future is going to look like."

Potrebbero piacerti anche