What Makes Designer Babies - 1799 Words

The process of creating life by handpicking a beings attributes and combining them to create a seemingly perfect human is a notion that is often related to the fictional work of Dr. Frankenstein. It is a surprise in its self that such a process is not in reality fictional, but an actual method of procreating infants in today’s modern day. Designer Babies, the end result of a scientific process that allows parents to preselect the genetic make up of their offspring, ensuring the disinheritance of a birth defect or guaranteeing the presence of a particular gene (Oxford Dictionaries 3). The process its self is called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or embryo screening. Embryo Screening is as follows, a three-day-old embryo is taken and one†¦show more content†¦Doctors say that in most situations the best form of treatment for severe blood diseases, and sometimes even leukemia, is a transfusion or transplant from a genetically-matched donor, but most often existing fam ily members are not compatible to the ill child and suitable donors may not be present (â€Å"Pre-implantation† 1). With such circumstances, spare part babies have been used to cure or treat their siblings with illnesses such as different variations of anemia, bone marrow failure, and the in near future leukemia. In 2000 Adam Nash became the first Spare Part Baby to be born in the United States with the purpose of saving his older sister Molly, who had been battling Fanconi’s anemia from birth (Lahl 2). Fanconi’s anemia (FA) is an inherited, rare form of anemia that leads to bone marrow failure and prevents the marrow from producing enough blood cells to keep the body functioning properly (â€Å"Types of Anemia 7). Fanconi’s anemia can also be the cause of birth defects, development of leukemia, and most commonly death in early childhood (Faison 1). From the moment Molly Nash was born doctors knew that her best bet of preventing future bone marrow failur e would be a transplant, but the odds were not in her favor to say the least. The chances of the transplant being successful with the donor being non-related was a low 18 percent; on the contrary, with the donor being related, the success rates were as high as 65 percent (Faison 1). The