Designer Babies

The phrase “Designer Babies” is a very important phrase in the science word today. It means that a person can design their own baby. Scientist today is able to detect which gene would cause a disease or birth defect in the baby. This could lead to the either the termination of a pregnancy, or if analyzed at a pre-implantation stage when using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), can enable the pregnancy to be created using only non-disease bearing genes (www.cnn.com). Not only can they detect the gene of a disease but they know which gene can change the baby’s gender. For example, in China and India the gender of the baby is very important. They will be able to scan their embryo for the gender of the baby and if that was not the gender that they wanted they would be able to change it. Where there might have been an X chromosome they could replace it with a Y chromosome, and where there was meant to be a Y chromosome they would be able to replace it with a X chromosome to change the sex of the baby. Technology these days is very advanced in many ways. Scanning an embryo is very high tech and is how scientist and doctors are able to determine certain things about the baby. Many people think that in the future they may be able to “cure” genetic disease in embryos by replacing faulty sections of DNA with healthy DNA, in a process called germ line therapy (www.cnn.com). In the future not sure how much far from the present of now, there will be a way to cure genetic diseases. They will also be able to change more things about their baby. That is where the phrase “designer babies” come into play. They would be able to do way more than just change the gender or cure a disease; they would be able to pick and choose what their baby would look like. Making their baby to be “perfect” by choosing their eye color, height, how intelligent they would be hair color, and many more things that come with a baby’s appearance and intellectuals.