Word: mothers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They were hardly the sort of couple you would expect to have trouble with prenatal testing. The father, Dallas geneticist Dr. Paul Billings, was the author of pioneering studies about genetic screening and its problems. The mother, Suzi, was also a physician. When she became pregnant at 37, she not only opted for amniocentesis--mainly to check for Down syndrome, an increased risk for children of mothers her age--but also for a newer genetic probe for an inheritable neuromuscular disease. She knew that a member of her family carried the gene for it and realized she might have...
Testing is, of course, already commonplace. As many as 9 out of 10 pregnant women in the U.S. submit to some prenatal screening. Typically, this involves sampling the mother's blood--so-called serum-alpha-fetoprotein testing to seek out telltale proteins that may indicate spina bifida, neural-tube defects or Down syndrome--or looking directly at the fetus with ultrasound scans. For women over 35, doctors usually recommend more invasive procedures in which actual fetal cells are gathered from the womb's amniotic fluid (amniocentesis) or placenta (chorionic villus sampling...
...life-threatening illnesses that they don't want to pass on to the next generation, they can opt for a remarkable procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). It starts with standard in-vitro fertilization, in which sperm from the father are mixed with eggs collected from the mother in a Petri dish. Then comes the genetic magic...
...their child was first used to select for health, not gender per se. Adapting a technique used on livestock, researchers at the Genetics & IVF Institute in Fairfax took advantage of a simple rule of biology: girls have two X chromosomes, while boys have one X and one Y. The mother has only Xs to offer, so the balance of power lies with the father--specifically with his sperm, which brings either an X or a Y to the fertilization party...
...announcement in February 1997 of the birth of a sheep named Dolly, an exact genetic replica of its mother, sparked a worldwide debate over the moral and medical implications of cloning. Several U.S. states and European countries have banned the cloning of human beings, yet South Korean scientists claimed last month that they had already taken the first step. In the following essay for TIME, embryologist Wilmut, who led the team that brought Dolly to life at Scotland's Roslin Institute, explains why he believes the debate over cloning people has largely missed the point...