Posted on 01/09/2009 9:54:00 AM PST by NYer
But here's the reality check: no disease has been cured here. Instead, if the test revealed that the baby girl carried the gene, she would have been destroyeed (and the parents would have presumably tried to conceive again, then re-tested, and on it goes).The first child in Britain known to have been screened as an embryo to ensure she did not carry a cancer gene was born Friday, a spokesman for University College London told CNN.
Her embryo was screened in a lab days after conception to check for the BRCA-1 gene, linked to breast and ovarian cancer.
People with the gene are known to have a 50-80 percent chance of developing breast or ovarian cancer in their lifetimes.
British newspapers have dubbed the girl the "cancer-free" baby.
"The parents will have been spared the risk of inflicting this disease on their daughter. The lasting legacy is the eradication of the transmission of this form of cancer that has blighted these families for generations." (CNN)
"When [the disease] hits your family over and over again, many couples are saying: 'Enough of this. Let's prune this out of our family tree forever.'""Prune this out of our family tree forever?"!
How many embryos lost their lives so this one could live? Embryo screening is fatal.
This is not something that should cause anyone any fear. This is a wonderful development in using science to benefit people.
Well then they are igorant fools.
So what happens when she develops Parkinson’s disease or some other form of cancer. Will they decide to “prune” her then?
Well then they are ignorant fools.
Accelerated evolution.
Darn. I didn’t think I SENT the one with the misspelling...
At the sacrifice of others? That’s not very “wonderful.”
On the contrary. It is the beginning of another slippery slope down which many will slide. Back in 1968, Pope Paul VI made a prophetic statement with regard to artificial birth control. That applies to fetal stem cell research and embryo screening as well.
“Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good," it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it (18)—in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general.”
I’ll leave the moral/ethical arguments to others.
Deleterious mutations need no external agent to be “pruned”. From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, I can only hope this sort of process never becomes widespread. A “defect” in one generation is a boon in another (see sickle-cell anemia). The optimal reproductive strategy is precisely the laissez-faires one: one operating under the primacy of natural selection, where reproductive fitness is a measure obtained by integration over thousands of generations over the full lifespan of the organisms (not just the reproductive lifespan). No central authority or “intelligent selection” can best this scenario over the long term without perfect prescience.
This short-term optimization will come at the expense of long-term genetic fitness (in the sense of populations), part of which is ensconced within the concept of intra-species gene diversity. Genetic heterogeneity is the path to extinction. Eugenics, like dysgenics (social welfare, “free” health/emergency care), is an enormously harmful distortion of the ideal: natural selection.
When science finally isolates the obesity gene and the homosexuality gene, let’s see how many babies fated to be gay and fat make it out of the womb.
There have been some recent studies suggesting that the BR-CA genes, the Tay-Sachs gene, and some other lysosomal storage disorder genes contributed to an increase in European Jewish intelligence beginning about 700 years ago.
Like the sickle cell trait, the lysosomal storage disorders seem to be beneficial in the heterozygous form, and lethal in the homozygous form. The BR-CA genes kill after allowing twenty years or so of reproduction.
Natural selection is a vicious bitch. She is very happy with some deleterious mutations, as we humans judge them to be by our moral and ethical standards.
She’ll probably still get cancer. I have a friend who is 40 years old with no cancer in her family and no other risk factors, and she got it.
OOOPS
Sorry, that sentence is saying the polar opposite of the rest of my post.
“Genetic heterogeneity is the path to extinction.”
should read
“Genetic HOMOGENEITY is the path to extinction.”
Unnnh!!!
I didn’t know what the word meant but I got the gist of your meaning from the post. Genetic diversity is good.
Cheetahs appear to have hit a genetic bottleneck sometime in the relatively recent past and have struggled ever since.
I’m confused. The article says this baby will be “cancer free,” but only from breast and ovarian cancer. What about lung cancer, colon cancer, kidney/bladder cancer, cervical cancer, brain cancer, leukemia and melanoma cancer?
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