(Newswire.net — January 20, 2015) — When making the ‘Gattaca’, Writer and director Andrew Niccol probably didn’t’t realize that genetically engineered children will be a possibility in the near future. According to BBC, leading genetics scientists advise that society needs to be prepared for the coming of genetically designed babies.
At the moment, DNA editing is possible and it is done, as far as we know, only on mice. Announcing gene editing as a science breakthrough, Dr. Tony Perry, a pioneer in cloning, states “designer babies” are no longer fiction.
Other leading scientists and bioethicists argue it is time for a serious public debate on the issue. Designer babies, genetically modified for beauty, intelligence or to be free of disease, have long been a topic of science fiction. Dr. Perry, however, said the technology is near. “This is not HG Wells, you can imagine people doing this soon.”
In the journal Scientific Reports, Dr. Perry explained in detail the precise editing of the genome of mice at the point that DNA from the sperm and the egg come together.
“We used a pair of molecular scissors and a molecular sat-nav that tells the scissors where to cut,” Perry told BBC. “It is approaching 100% efficiency already, it’s a case of ‘you shoot you score’.”
Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, from the UK Medical Research Council, has been influential in the debate around making babies from three people and uses the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology in his own lab.
He said testing embryos for disease during In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) would be the best way of preventing diseases being passed down through the generations, but there is much more potential in that method. It would also be useful in circumstances when all embryos would carry the undesirable, risky genes, professor said.
“Obviously in the UK, this is not allowed and there would have to be a change in regulations, which I suspect would have enormous problems,” Prof Lovell-Badge told the BBC News website. He added that “It is something that needs to start to be debated.”