Genetically Screened Baby Born
AP Online
Mittwoch, 15. November 2000 20:55:00
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By ISABELLE CORTES
Associated Press Writer
PARIS (AP) -- A French woman has given birth to the nation's
first genetically screened baby after she lost two other children
to a deadly genetic disease, doctors said Wednesday.
The baby boy, known only by his first name, Valentin, was born
early Monday at the Antoine-Beclere Hospital in Clamart, outside
Paris, doctors said. His parents' identities were not disclosed.
Doctors said the baby's condition was "satisfactory," though he
was born six weeks before term.
The couple, who have no trouble conceiving naturally, underwent
invitro fertilization and a process called pre-implantation genetic
diagnosis, or PGD, in an effort to ensure their baby did not have
the gene defect.
Doctors would not specify which genetic disease the couple were
trying to avoid, other than saying it destroys the liver.
In the United States, the same process resulted in the birth
this summer of Adam Nash, in the hopes that his umbilical cord
blood could save his older sister, Molly, who was suffering from
Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic disease.
The French medical team studied the technique used at the
Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago, where baby Adam was
conceived. Embryonic research is currently against the law in
France, and doctors plan to ask lawmakers to repeal the ban on such
research, the medical team said at a news conference.
"The (French) couple had no problem having children," Dr.
Arnold Munnich, the genetic pediatrician who heads the Genetics
Department at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital, said on
France-Info radio. "Their problem was having healthy children."
Besides losing two young children, the baby's mother also
underwent an abortion after the fetus she was carrying was
discovered to harbor the gene, doctors said.
Munnich said the principles and techniques were the same as in
traditional prenatal diagnostic testing, "except that here we
intervene at the moment of fertilization, in the earliest stages of
the embryo's development, before its implantation in the uterus."
Munnich said he did not believe the procedure would lead to
eugenics, the science of selecting genes to improve the human
species. Munnich worked closely on the operation with France's
leading obstetrician, Dr. Rene Frydman, who was responsible for the
country's first test-tube baby.
Jean-Francois Mattei, president of the centrist Liberal
Democracy Party and member of the National Assembly's Ethics
Committee, called the birth a success.
The technique "allows families that have undergone terrible
suffering to have the children they desire in safe conditions," he
said.
Twenty-one couples in France have already expressed interest in
using the technique, and five women are currently carrying fetuses
conceived using the screening technique, doctors said.