Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)

"Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal."
~Eckhart Tolle

Since nobody or no parent wants a defective child, how do we obtain 100% perfect babies? By doing pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). It means we carefully plan which genes should go into a baby which we researchers will design for a couple, so that the newborn designer baby becomes the source of cure for its own older siblings. In designing babies, we are actually selecting good genes which do not have any defects, so that the newborns are supposedly healthy and normal, not sick or with the same genetic disease(s) of their siblings.

We have a big problem with patients suffering from various difficult-to-cure diseases and the potential of research which we can do to help such patients. Since Watson and Crick first built their double-stranded helix DNA model in 1953, we are plunged into deeper and bigger grey areas where ethics rules all judgment and we still have conscience about trespassing them when we know about the potential of DNA and stem cell for curing such difficult hard-to-cure diseases caused by DNA mutations which are life-long and without a simple straight forward cure at this time. We may think we live in a first world, or even a make-belief first world, but when we have a life-long disease at hand to worry about its cure or find a cure, then we have to know whether to pitch on safe grounds or pitch in the grey zone and wait for the critics to lash their laser-sharp tongues! Researchers and medical students alike must know what is right and what is wrong in medical practice and research concerning such issues, and be able to weigh the benefits of what critics consider bad against what researchers  consider "not too bad", "may work somewhat", or "could work and then fail but worth trying".

A good example of tough decision-making is to consider "designer babies", a term favourably used to describe how babies are precisely designed and engineered in the research lab, so as not to contain genetic errors, so that these babies can become "saviour babies" when they are born. Their cord blood is highly prized for harvesting stem cells for use in curing hard-to-cure life-long diseases of their own older siblings who are still toddlers or pre-schoolers. Is designing such babies ethically right or wrong? Are doctors and researchers wrong and must they be held accountable if they try to find a cure for the impossible? Blunders are synonymous with research. Two patients who received genetic therapy died from leukaemia. Whom do we blame? The doctors & researchers who intervened, the patients or their parents? Since we can't depend on gene therapy, the only avenue we have now is stem cell extracted from cord blood of designer babies and from the bone marrow of the long bones. What are the long bones in our body? How are stem cells extracted from the bone marrow?

An analogy is we didn't have penicillin prior to WWII. Was it fortuitous to discover this drug? If we don't try, we will never know the worth of a cure for any difficult disease. It is therefore best to leave such delicate decision-making in the hands of experts. This means experts must also have at least some basic knowledge before they can make a good decision.

As a researcher, I would like to qualify that there must be an active watch dog committee that truly understands and studies every decision that researchers and scientists do today. The grey zone in this type of research is merging and overlapping with clear areas and can possibly turn what is already clearly wrong to be the best research option we have and therefore the right thing to do, and the next course of action. Blinding the lay public must never be allowed loose. The public must know what research is trying to do and achieve. New medical students must know. Issues in medical research today are life-and-death issues. Diseases today are life-threatening and life-long but the cures are hidden somewhere on earth. Too many people suffer and die in sheer agony when we try to slow down research as we allow such ethical issues to be ironed out in our courts. Stem cells have helped overcome diseased blood vessels. Next in the pipeline is stem cells for glaucoma, in trying to stem blindness.

Prof Faridah

Viewpoints on PGD from fiqhmedic.wordpress.com. Covers "hukum".