PollenTree

When should we stop?

We have seen a number of new developments in the field of reproduction many of which have benefited the general population such as treatments to overcome fertility problems. But at what stage should we stop? Is it ethical or wise to continue to a point where we are able to reproduce the first cloned child? Should children be conceived and grown outside of the human body? Should we be able to select our child’s sex, skin, hair and eye colour? Who benefits from taking science to this level?

In 2005 British Scientists said that they were close to showing that human eggs and sperm can be created from stem cells and as such it might be possible to clone stem cells from an infertile patient and turn them into eggs or sperm for IVF.

2007 has seen a number of developments in the field of IVF such as:

• In Canada Melanie Boivin has frozen some of her ovarian eggs to donate to her seven year old daughter. Her daughter suffers from Turner’s Syndrome an inherited condition which makes her infertile. This mother to daughter egg donation would mean the daughter giving birth to a half-sibling. At present it is unknown how long eggs can be frozen for but embryos have been born from eggs frozen for more than 10 years.

• Again in Canada an 11 month old baby, named only as Carine was conceived from an egg that was frozen after being matured in the laboratory. Carine is the first child to be born from an artificially matured egg that was frozen and thawed (rather than immature eggs ripened in a test tube).

• In Israel doctors reported that they had successfully perfected a technique to extract immature eggs from the ovaries of girls as young as five. This would benefit children suffering from cancer as the eggs could be ripened in a laboratory and then frozen and stored to give the child the chance of starting a family at a later stage.

• In Britain the regulatory body HFEA gave the go ahead to scientists to create embryos which are part human and part animal (known as “cytoplasmic hrbrids”) for the purposes of investigating medical conditions such as Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and Motor Neurone diseases.