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Genetic Linkage

The age of genetically-enhanced children is approaching. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro imagines a have-and-have not future, and it’s not pleasant

Biotech interventions to help sick children—like gene therapy—are approached with supreme caution. If a treatment has a reasonable chance of working, and especially if there aren't alternatives, potential benefits might clearly outweigh the risks, and favor running a clinical trial. 

 

But genetic modification of sperm, eggs, or embryos is a different story, even with a therapeutic goal (see GLP Ricki Lewis' Designer babies? US scientists swap DNA in embryos, replacing mutation that causes heart problems). Scrutiny is even more intense if the intervention aims not to heal or prevent illness, but to genetically enhance children, striving to somehow "improve" them.

 

Could genetic modification endow a child with high intelligence, facility with learning languages, musical or artistic ability, or mathematical genius? And what would happen to a society in which wealth determines whose children are enhanced?

Gene editing creates class-ism

 

Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Klara and the Sun, imagines a world in which some children are rendered exceptionally intelligent with genetic modification. The British author, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, also wrote the 2005 dystopian masterpiece Never Let Me Go (and 2010 film), set at an English boarding school in the 1990s. In that alternate reality, people are cloned to provide organs for the wealthy, perishing proudly in young adulthood when they run out of spare parts.

 

To continue reading, go to Genetic Literacy Project, where this post first appeared.

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Wishbone Day Raises Awareness of Osteogenesis Imperfecta

Today, May 6th, is Wishbone Day, to raise awareness about osteogenesis imperfecta (OI).

 

Also known as "brittle bone disease," OI is a consequence of mutations that disrupt the highly organized structure of collagen, a major component of connective tissues. Collagen accounts for more than half the protein in bone and cartilage, and is also part of skin, ligaments, tendons, and the dentin of teeth.

 

Because OI is due to a deficit of collagen, eating more calcium doesn't help – the advice given to members of a family I wrote about here. Before many genes behind OI were identified, some parents of children with OI were suspected of child abuse, especially when a second child had fractures too.

 

A Collection of Collagen Conditions

 

To continue reading, go to DNA Science, my blog at Public Library of Science.

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