If you’re after a designer super-baby, you can forget it | Mark Henderson - Times Online

If you’re after a designer super-baby, you can forget it | Mark Henderson - Times Online: "If you’re after a designer super-baby, you can forget it
We’re not on the slippery slope to a genetic dystopia
Mark Henderson

The smiling young woman in a red dress who stared out from the front page of The Times yesterday does not much look like the face of eugenics. Yet to her critics, she is about to cross an ethical boundary.

If the fertility watchdog grants permission to her doctor – and it has already agreed in principle – she will soon start IVF treatment, even though she is fertile. Her embryos will then be screened for a gene that heightens the risk of breast cancer. This gene killed her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother, and she carries it herself. Now she has an opportunity to spare her daughters this devastating heirloom"