Image from Nature Reviews Genetics 3, 941-955 (December 2002)

While this technology offers the hope to increase the success of IVF, it does raise some concerns about choosing a child in order to meet the needs and desires of parents. While most cases seem to have parents that are trying to increase their chances of having a viable pregnancy, some have raised some major ethical dilemmas. For example, two parents with achondroplasia, a disorder of bone growth that causes the most common form of dwarfism , is caused by having only one mutated copy of a gene. These parents might want to avoid an embryo that receives a mutated copy from both parents, which would be lethal. Instead, would they possibly choose an embryo that only has one affected copy, which would result in a child with achondroplasia, instead of an unaffected embryo? Would an unaffected child suffer more in an achondroplastic family than an affected child in such an environment?

This technique can be applied in a variety of ways, but I wonder if there are more ethical concerns than anything else. With any new technology, just because we can, should we? Are parents going to do this just to have a child free of genetic disease? Or is the future of “designer babies” closer than we think?

Among other uses, we finally get to the idea that these bacterial cells can be used as factories to make any protein you want, even human proteins.  It all depends on what recipe, or gene, you give them.  If you give them the recipe to make human insulin, they will. And then this insulin can be used to treat diabetes.

They can see the benefits when discussing bacteria, but once I show them a picture of a multicellular organism that has been engineered with this protein, such as a pig or monkey, the debate begins to heat up. That while the protein is harmless to the organism, they don’t feel it is necessary to make pigs glow.  While this may be true, many researchers would beg to differ.

Researchers use this protein in many studies that were once invisible. If they are studying the production of a protein, maybe when the protein gets produced during development, or in what type of cell it gets made, they can visualize this process with the help of the green fluorescent protein. This will hopefully give insight to many disorders that result from the faulty production of a protein.  We need to see how and when the process works normally to gain more information about when it does not work. Then we can hopefully use this information to fix it.

Many debates arise during discussions involving genetic research because of the potential benefits that could arise from the study, while disturbing a few people or groups along the way. These are good discussions to have with students though, as they may be faced with decisions in the future about potential career choices or matters that will affect them on a more personal level.