After the uproar caused by his offer to let parents choose traits like eye and hair colour when selecting embryos for implanting, fertility specialist Dr Jeff Steinberg said on Tuesday that his clinics will only be offering parents the facility to screen embryos on medical grounds, such as genetic diseases.
Steinberg, who has clinics in Los Angeles and Manhattan, said that a story published on Monday in the New York (NY) Daily News about his plan to let parents choose physical traits, even for cosmetic reasons, led to a flood of calls. He is now saying they are not going to do that and will be focusing on families with a history of genetic diseases like albinism and colour blindness instead.
Until Monday, his clinic’s website showed an announcement that they were planning to offer “predictive genomics” that would allow parents to have embryos screened for “eye color, hair color, cancer tendency and more”, said the NY Daily News.
Steinberg pioneered IVF in the 1970s, and predicts that a trait-selected baby will be born next year, said a BBC News report.
His clinics already offer sex selection, and a mother who underwent treatment at the NYU Fertility Center to select the gender of her third baby defended the service. She told the NY Daily News on Tuesday that:
“When you have two of the same, it’s awesome and amazing, but when you have one of the other, too, it’s just different.”
Some experts are annoyed that the controversy over this issue will distract people from how the same science, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD, can be used to prevent inherited diseases from being passed on.
PDG takes a cell from the embryo before it is implanted in the womb and screens it for so called “rogue” genes. The same procedure can be used to screen for cosmetically desirable traits such as eye and hair colour. An embryo with the desirable traits is then selected for implantation while those that don’t have them are discarded.
Steinberg told the media that he did not think this was a dangerous road but rather an uncharted one.
Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics told the BBC that:
“This is the inevitable slippery slope of a fertility process which results in many more embryos being created than can be implanted.”
Steinberg said the technology has been around for years and it was “time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand”.
Another UK fertility expert, Dr Gillian Lockwood who sits on the ethics committee of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists cautioned that offering such services will turn babies into “commodities that you buy off the shelf”.
“If it gets to the point where we can decide which gene or combination of genes are responsible for blue eyes or blonde hair, what are you going to do with all those other embryos that turn out like me to be ginger with green eyes?” she said to the BBC.
Sources: New York Daily News, BBC News.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD