First baby in Britain designed cancer-freehttp://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,298927,00.jpgA WOMAN is pregnant with Britain’s first designer baby selected to prevent an inherited cancer, The Times can reveal.
Her decision to use controversial genetic-screening technology will ensure that she does not pass on to her child the hereditary form of eye cancer from which she suffers.
Although they did not have fertility problems, the woman and her partner created embryos by IVF. This allowed doctors to remove a cell and test it for the cancer gene, so only unaffected embryos were transferred to her womb.
The couple are the first to take advantage of a relaxation in the rules governing embryo screening.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2178178,00.htmlA little background on the movie.....WHEN SCIENCE-FICTION scenarists imagine a future shaped by eugenics, it's typically cold, bright, antiseptic. "Gattaca," an intermittently imaginative new movie about a "not too distant future" dominated by a genetically programmed elite, alters this picture in subtle ways: Its characters strive for a germ-free gleam but always seem to be littering the floor with unwanted bits of genetic material -- eyelashes, skin flakes, hair. And in this world, even when you're a "Valid," and have had all standard-issue imperfections (myopia, baldness, cardiac flaws) removed from your chromosomes, you must still submit yourself to endless finger-pricking blood tests and urine donations to prove your status; your precious bodily fluids are always on call.
"Gattaca's" protagonist is an "Invalid" masquerading as one of the elite. Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is really a "faith child," a product of the old-fashioned genetic lottery, and his near-sightedness and other imperfections doom him to a life of cleaning toilets. But Vincent Has A Dream -- he wants more than anything to be navigator on a spaceship to Titan, Saturn's moon. So, with the aid of a black-market specialist in "borrowed ladders" -- genetic identities for sale -- he hooks up with Jerome Morrow (Jude Law). Jerome has a perfect gene map, but something's gone wrong with his life anyway; an auto accident turned him into an alcoholic in a wheelchair, and now he's willing to sell his genetic identity to Vincent as long as Vincent keeps him in booze.
Which turns out to be a lot tougher than just, say, forging a signature. Vincent and Jerome wind up as roommates -- with Jerome stockpiling his blood and pee in basement refrigerators and Vincent resorting to elaborate rituals of depilation and skin-scraping to remove traces of his own genes. Vincent passes himself off as Jerome well enough to make it into the inner sanctum of the Gattaca Corporation, a fortress of the super-elite that runs the space missions Vincent yearns to join. (Gattaca's name is derived from the four letters of DNA code -- GTCA.) But days before his launch, a murder inside Gattaca leads to investigations that threaten to unmask his ruse.
http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/1997/10/24gattaca.html
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