• Question: Can babies genes be altered before birth, allowing them to have certain characteristics?

    Asked by Sas the gym lass to Deborah, Euan, Maheen, Rob, Stu on 21 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Rob Stanley

      Rob Stanley answered on 21 Jun 2016:

      We may soon have the ability to do this. We might want to do it to fix certain diseases, but we will need to decide whether the technology is ethical for non-life threatening diseases.

    • Photo: Maheen Siddiqui

      Maheen Siddiqui answered on 21 Jun 2016:

      Hi Sas the gym lass,

      At the moment we’re not allowed to do this. Its called genetic engineering and there are many ethical issues surrounding it! As Rob said, many people are trying to get this going because it could potentially help us get rid of diseases but its much more complicated than that.

      Some people say that we could remove a particular gene and cure a particular disease, but scientists don’t know the role of every single gene and it may be that that gene is needed for something else thats very important in the body! So there are many issues surrounding this. It may be possible in the future though.

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