“Breast Cancer Free” Baby Born in the UK
What would you do if you wanted a baby, but all your husband’s female relatives had suffered from breast cancer, the kind that doctors knew was caused by a faulty gene?
A controversial egg selection technique selection has resulted in the first baby girl born in the UK this week that doctors know is free from breast cancer genes. Women with either of the genes, called BRCA1 and BRCA2, are seven times more likely to get breast cancer – that means that 60% of women who have either BRCA1 or BRCA2 will get breast cancer in their lifetimes.
The faulty genes cause around 10% of breast cancer cases, and are carried from generation to generation, which is why the parents of the baby girl chose to have doctors screen and select an embryo that was free from both genes.
Doctors in London used in-vitro fertilization techniques to fertilize 11 of the mother’s eggs with the fathers sperm, and then let the eggs develop for several days. When the embryos were several days old, one cell was removed from each and tested for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Six of the eggs tested positive. Two of the five remaining eggs were implanted, resulting in a single pregnancy and a healthy baby girl.
The fertility doctors haven’t released what happened to the six embryos that tested positive for the breast cancer genes, but it’s likely they will be destroyed or used for research.
Genetic screening is only legal in the United Kingdom to screen for genetic diseases. It’s been used for diseases like Huntingdon’s Disease and Cystic Fibrosis, conditions for which if a baby has the gene, it will certainly get the disease.
Having the breast cancer gene doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman will get breast cancer, and if she does, it has the potential to be cured. And not having the breast cancer gene doesn’t mean that a woman will never get breast cancer, since the other 90% of non-genetic breast cancer cases don’t have a known cause.
It’s less of an ethical dilemma to select embryos to avoid a fatal genetic disease that all carriers of the gene will die from. But is it ethical to select embryos to avoid the breast cancer gene?
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Dawn Allcot says...
Great thought provoking post.
Is it ethical? I believe so. After all, we all want to give our children every advantage available in life. Now, those advantages can start even before conception. (Well, I guess they already do when we eat healthy or take prenatals pre-pregnancy…)
Still, I don’t have the best family health history and if it were possible and affordable to pre-screen in order to insure our children get the strongest, best genes we could, I wouldn’t hesitate!
The issue of what to do with frozen, unused embryos is a challenging one, but I don’t believe this is any different from couples who have invitro due to infertility? “Killing” an embryo is still “killing” an embryo, (or not, depending on your views) regardless of why it was created.
I don’t really think it IS a different ethical question than pre-screening for certainly fatal defects v. potentially fatal genes.
Just my IMHO, and not trying to be incendiary or anything. (Although I’m all for friendly debate!)
Helena Denley says...
Have you seen the movie “Gattaca” (1997). Do we really want to belong to a world of pre-selection for disease free individuals.
And having specific genes doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to get a particular disease.
Dr Bruce Lipton has a great audio presentation called “The Wisdom of Your Cells” based on his book “The Biology of Belief”. Well worth a listen or read because he discusses in great depth how genes actually work – smashing our current beliefs that if you have the gene for a particular disease you are doomed to get it.
Very enlightening.
Helena Denleys last blog post..The Sleep Deprived New Mum – How to Avoid Becoming a Rabid Dog