Posted on 06/18/2006 6:30:46 PM PDT by neverdem
British fertility specialists have developed a powerful new way to test embryos for inherited diseases, offering hundreds of couples their first realistic chance of having healthy children. The procedure has been hailed as a big advance, boosting the number of diseases clinics can test for from about 200 to nearly 6,000. It will allow doctors to test for the first time a vast array of inherited diseases for which the specific genetic mutation is not known, such as Duchenne's muscular dystrophy (DMD) and some forms of cystic fibrosis. Using the technique, doctors can examine every embryo created for a couple through IVF, and determine whether each is healthy and unaffected, a carrier of the disease, or destined to develop the full-blown medical condition.
Such detailed knowledge of the genetic make-up of embryos will lead to a radical shift in the way couples at risk of passing on certain diseases are treated.
Some inherited conditions, known as x-linked diseases, are only passed on to boys, but because the mutations that cause the diseases are unknown, clinics can only screen them out by discarding every male embryo created, even if only half are affected. The new test will allow doctors to see which male embryos are free of the disease-causing mutation, so fewer embryos will be wasted. In some cases, the test will allow doctors the controversial option of asking couples to choose the sex of the embryos that are transplanted.
"This is a big, big change in what we are going to be able to do. It changes everything," said Professor Peter Braude of King's College London, who was involved in the research. Specialists at Guy's hospital in London have already used the technique to "cherry pick" healthy embryos for seven women at risk of passing on inherited diseases. Five of...
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Quoting Bond films, aren't we?
WTF? No, I'm just pointing out that the last word in the post of yours to which I previously referred does not mean what you think it means.
"Fellatious" does NOT have the same definition as "fallacious." Not at all.
You could look it up.
pinging me
I can't believe you beat me to it!
They'll be isolating the "pretty" genes next.
"I can't believe you beat me to it!"
I'm good--I'da beat you twice, if the $#@!$#@! first link had worked. 8)
Nice Freudian Slip.
I see, well, it's nice to know that someone out there is simpatico, hat tip to you my friend.
Cool.
Thanks for your post. If only people read books anymore...
Everyone is weak, sometimes it takes being on their deathbed for them to finally realize it.
Perhaps you were after facetious (meaning tongue-in-cheek) instead? Or "fallacious" meaning based on a false premise.
Loosen up. Although [or because of] English is my second language, I know what "fellatious" means. I also know that phonetically it is sufficiently similar to "fallacious", but at the same time conveys a figurative meaning of what the argument or reasoning referred to are good for. So, look for it as an example of creative usage, along the lines of "hugh" or "series", but at a different - more pointed - level.
see # 37
Actually what you described there was man-made DEvolution. And while medical advances deserve a certain amount of the blame, socialist wealth redistribution schemes (including those that pay for medical treatments) are even more to blame. Competent, healthy people are being taxed to death to support the offspring of an ever-increasing dysfunctional incompetent underclass, many of whom are completely incapable of keeping their offspring alive to reporductive age without colossal handouts. When a crack whore or meth head has baby number 3 in her late teens, we shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the damaged premature infant alive for the first few months, then a million or so in a combination of special ed, CPS interventions, foster care, and ongoing medical care for the child, and for most of the male children, quite of bit of time in prison at about $40K/year (and multiply everything by 3, because there were 2 more before this one). This not only wreaks havoc on the gene pool by artificially maintaining and increasing her genes, and the genes of the kind of men who have sex with women like her, but also by putting tremedous pressure on competent people to limit their child-bearing due to their huge tax burden and their unwillingness to send their own children to school filled with the disruptive, dim-witted, drug-using, and often children pumped out by the crack whores and meth heads.
Not if her family felt able to deal with it. But not everybody is able to deal with it. Some people are barely keeping their heads above water psychologically already -- they may already be dealing with another seriously ill child, or elderly parents, or disabilities of their own, or serious financial problems, or are overwhelmed by a couple of preschool aged children who will get short shrift if a severely disabled baby joins the family, etc. People need to make their own decisions, and be responsible for bearing the resulting burdens themselves (or via private assistance, such as their church, or an insurance company that is free to choose what it will and won't insure and at what price) -- not dumping them on "the village". And people need to make their own decisions about how much pain it is worth having an infant/child endure, when the only positive feelings generated are for the parents -- sometimes it's simply selfish to choose to put a helpless creature through such suffering. It's completely specious to compare elective screening of embryos to "the Nazis", as many people try to do. Hitler's program was about the government deciding who should live or die, and enforcing its opinions via bullet, torture followed by gas chamber, or slow starvation. It was most emphatically NOT about empowering free citizens to make life-or-death choices based on their OWN values.
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