Fertility clinic will use genetic techniques to create tailor-made children
A Los Angeles clinic plans to help parents undergoing fertility treatments design their own babies, reports the Wall Street Journal, noting the clinic has already received “half a dozen” requests for the service. At Fertility Institutes, an unregulated technique called pre-implantation geneetic diagnosis (PGD) will be used so parents can select the gender and physical traits of their child. Many countries have banned PGD for gender selection, but not the U.S. One pioneer of the PGD process, which is intended to avoid passing potentially deadly disorders on to kids, told the WSJ that any lab using it for cosmetic purposes would be “ostracized;” but Fertility Institutes director Jeff Steinberg disagrees. “Others are frightened by the criticism but we have no problems with it,” he says.