"For all our knowledge, sex, conception and the processes that lead up to birth are still something of a mystery" "But it's a mystery we're rapidly unravelling, and the more we understand about the beginning of life, the more we can change it" "One day medicine may change the destiny of children before they are even conceived" "Medicine intervened in the fate of this baby long before he was born" "This looks like a perfectly normal little baby boy, but he's actually rather rare" "The genes he's inherited from his parents weren't left to chance:" "He was selected, and the science which produced him is now taking all of us into uncharted territory" "This programme will look at some extraordinary things that can already be done when it comes to making babies" "And it will explore the things that our ability to manipulate genes are now making possible Question is:" "How far should we go?" "Scientists are already trying to grow body parts from embryos;" "Combine the DNA from three different people to produce a child;" "And even trying to change the genes in sperm which might ultimately lead to altering whole populations" "Manipulating genes inevitably raises the spectre of the creation of a master-race, the mad scientist bent on pursuing human perfection is a standard of science fiction" "Do you long for the days when you had a full head of hair?" "Brothers, we can make baldness a thing of the past" "Your children, and your children's children, need never fear ridicule again we can stamp this out for ever Bald men of the world unite!" "This is far-fetched, even Ludicrous" "But the potential of what's being done today is as exciting and disturbing as any science fiction" "Any time we start to interfere with the stuff of life, we have to tread carefully" "But scientists think there is also tremendous potential for doing good and that already we can see the benefits" "Genetic disease is one of the commonest causes of death in babies" "Recent scientific advances mean that it is possible for the first time to offer something new to the casualties of inherited illnesses" "Joshua was very small when he was born:" "He was only five pound one and a half ounces, and we had to go out and buy him special clothes because he was too small to fit in the new-born baby things" "He had a cough and cold and it was winter-time, and we were concerned we took him to the doctor's four times in the end" "And the doctor thought he had 'bronchitis' and wanted him admitted to hospital that day" "He then asked if Joshua had ever been tested for Cystic Fibrosis, and we said no, and he said:" "Oh we must get the tests arranged" "They'd said that really they'd done all they could do and the situation was so bad now there was nothing more they could do, all in the space of about forty minutes really" "Then we decided to get him christened, didn't we?" "Yeah, we asked to have the chaplain there and so the chaplain came and they took all the monitors and everything off Joshua because we didn't want him to die basically undignified really" "And he died in my arms with Chris holding us as well, wasn't it, and my mum was there as well" "And then really I think he's actually- he'd actually died when he actually got christened" "Joshua died when he was four months old" "He was Sue and Chris Paget-Dunthorne's first baby" "They desperately want another child but are terrified the same thing will happen again" "On the Scilly Isles, just off the most western tip of Britain, another couple face the same dilemma" "Jade was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis when she was just three months old" "Jade is three now" "Her family's day is taken up with managing her illness" "Morning and evening, Jade's parents give her physiotherapy to break up the mucus which threatens to clog up her lungs" "She takes daily antibiotics and enzymes to help her digest food properly" "She has little resistance to infection" "Her life expectancy is low" "we all have a number of abnormal genes which are harmless unless our partner also happens to have the same genetic defect" "Cystic Fibrosis is the most common genetic defect in Northern Europe" " roughly one in twenty of us carry the Cystic Fibrosis gene when two carriers get together, they run a high risk of having an affected baby" "Always wanted at least two" " I always at least two" "Think you wanted about three or four, but I'm happy with two we both carry the CF gene, so there's a one in four chance that we might have another CF baby" "They say you can have a test in the early stages as well, and if- y'know, you can have it aborted, again- which for both of us wasn't- wasn't an option" "we didn't know whether we could make a decision to abort a baby with Cystic Fibrosis knowing that Joshua had the condition, or whether we could cope with a baby with Cystic Fibrosis after losing a child to it." "So we had some really serious thinking to do" "At Hammersmith Hospital in London, a technique has been pioneered which can help couples who know that they are at risk of having a baby with the genetic disease, but who do not want to have an abortion" "It's called PGD, or Pre-lmplantation Genetic Diagnosis" "It involves growing embryos in the lab, then screening them for Cystic Fibrosis" "This is the first follicle on the left" "The chances of success are low, but both couples have decided to try it" "First, Sue's eggs have to be collected from her ovaries" "OK, I've got three cells here, Stuart, just checking this" "Yeah, that's the first egg Thank you" "The ovary contains a number of follicles or sacs" "Normally every month one follicle swells with fluid and produces a mature egg ready for fertilisation" "But for PGD more than one egg is needed, so Sue's ovaries have been stimulated by drugs" "The follicle is the dark area in the centre of the screen" "You can see the needle go in, and the follicle shrink, as a tiny egg is sucked out" "That's another egg, that's fifteen now" "Thanks Ben" "After the eggs are collected, all fifteen are fertilised by Chris's sperm in the lab" "The fertilised eggs are left to grow for three days in an incubator" "By then, six have become embryos and are ready to be tested" "Each is so small it's invisible to the naked eye" "In an incredibly delicate procedure, one cell is then removed from each embryo and its genetic make-up tested" "Even this early, it's possible to predict which of these embryos will develop into a human with Cystic Fibrosis" "That's because each cell contains all the genetic information which goes into making the final human being" "This remarkable photograph shows an embryo after it's had a cell removed this way" "It's been magnified many thousands of times" "Astonishingly, even though a large chunk of the embryo has had to be removed to do the tests, it still goes on dividing and developing quite normally" "Fiona had her eggs removed and fertilised three days ago" "She and Pete are returning to the Hammersmith to see if they've produced any healthy embryos" "This is like the day we could get- you could become pregnant, so it's" "Yeah, D-Day!" "Pete and Fiona have produced five embryos, cells from which are now being tested" "The DNA is separated by being run through a gel" "Using an ultra-violet light," "Doctor Debbie Taylor can then tell if any embryos will be affected by Cystic Fibrosis" "This way, she can select which embryos to return to Fiona and which to reject" "The diagnosis on No. 1 was..." "The tests have shown there are four embryos which don't have Cystic Fibrosis, and one which does" "That looks like a normal..." "Good evening, how are you?" "Not too bad" "This is the team, this is Dr. Debbie Taylor, she's the scientist that was involved with the diagnosis" "And this is Jonathan Taylor, he's our embryologist" "OK, I think we should start off by saying it's good news..." "Relax now" "I'm sure this comes as a huge relief we got results on five of the embryos so we've actually in fact got a choice, or a selection of the best embryos to put back" "Now during the day those embryos have been in the incubator and developing all the time, so what's going to happen now, while we get you changed," "John's going to pop up to the lab and actually have a look at how the growth has gone during the day, and really pick which are the best-looking embryos, the ones that perhaps have grown and divided," "and we can decide on the best ones to put back" "Good, hoorah." "Relieved?" "Yeah" "Sue and Chris are also coming into the hospital in the hope that they too have produced embryos which are free of Cystic Fibrosis" "But unknown to them, there's a problem" "The genetic analysis didn't work on a single one of Sue and Chris's embryos" "There is a chance that if I change the conditions slightly that we can actually get it to work the second time round" "Yes but it's now so late" "Those embryos will be in culture a long time" "Is it worth- really worth doing?" "I think from what we see now, we ought to" "Give it a go" "Yeah, I'd like to give it a go" "Now, it's unusual for this to happen, but we have been in this situation before, and what we suggest is that we have a second go at analysing the results" "...ask you to look after yourselves for a bit longer, if you don't mind" "So Sue and Chris began a long wait" "Meanwhile, Pete and Fiona have two healthy embryos transferred to the womb ...slowly see the catheter moving out of the uterus..." "Dr. Debbie Taylor tried re-testing Sue and Chris's embryos" "It was an extremely tense time" "This sort of genetic testing is normally surprisingly reliable" "In fact, they've only failed like this once before" "No one knew if the tests would work a second time round" "If they don't get a result the second time around, they'll have to start the whole cycle again" "This could take months" "Just before midnight, and they're on the verge of knowing if the second run of the tests has worked" "Great, it's worked, yeah" "You can actually see we've got two carriers, so we've got something to transfer" "Fantastic" "Yeah, it's wonderful" "So just after midnight, the medical team went through the deserted hospital and opened up the theatre where they do the embryo transfers" "Here's the two embryos we're going to transfer" "Both have seven cells one two three four five six seven in that one" "One two three four five six seven in that one" "And there's the little hole we drilled in it where we were taking the cells for analysis" "And they've grown since the biopsy" "Not surprising, it's pretty late" "So there's the two little embryos and the drop of fluid which are invisible to the naked eye..." "Sue and Chris, and Pete and Fiona now have to wait ten days to see if the embryo transfer has been successful and if they've become pregnant" "For them to become pregnant, the embryos that have been put back have to implant, or stick into this, the lining of the womb" "Now, for the first time ever, these photographs show how over the course of a month, the lining of a woman's womb changes so that it is in the best possible condition to receive the fertilised egg" "Magnified on your screen up to a million times we discover a complex system, much of which is still a mystery" "During the first fourteen days of a woman's cycle, a layer of cells starts to build up" "Then suddenly the womb surface changes ...penapods appear The womb is now ready for the embryos" "The penopods however last for less than two days" "Then they, and the lining of the womb, start to deteriorate" "Scientists now think it's normally during those brief 48 hours that an embryo can implant" "This is a picture of an embryo that has implanted although there's still no guarantee that it will go on to make a baby" "Most fertilised eggs don't even get this far" "Humans are amongst the most infertile animals on the planet" "In fact, it's extraordinarily difficult for humans to get pregnant" "Even a couple producing normal sperm and a normal egg may not produce a normal embryo" "And even when the embryo seems to be normal, there may still be a problem" "All too often, the embryos just don't stick" "The reason why embryos don't stick in normal or assisted pregnancies is very often because the embryos just aren't good enough" "Even when an embryo successfully implants and gets to six weeks, like this one here, things can go wrong" "Only one out of six pregnancies survive long enough to get up to eight weeks" "There have been great improvements with genetic screening, so it's sad and frustrating when embryos that have been screened successfully don't go on and become babies" "Scientists are trying to understand more about how embryos develop so that they can improve the chances of a happy outcome" "The desperate need to have a child, means that many couples are prepared to try ever more experimental procedures" "April and John Molinaire live in New Jersey" "They describe themselves as everybody's favourite aunt and uncle" "But they desperately want to be parents themselves" "The reason they're not is because they can't produce viable embryos" "April actually grew up two houses away from me, so I've pretty much known her all my life and I guess she's known me all her life, as far as that goes" "we didn't want to start trying to have a baby right away, so we were married for three years before we started trying to have a baby" "And it's been a long five years" "Because they didn't conceive normally, April and John had IVF treatment, but after April's eggs were fertilised, her embryos stopped growing normally and began to fragment and break up" "Five out of the six embryos began to fragment" "They weren't sure exactly why they were fragmenting" "They gave us one good embryo and said this looks decently healthy, and we tried it and it just didn't take, it" " I mean, that kind of devastated April and I because we never expected that to happen" "Yeah, we just thought if we could fertilise an egg that you-we would have a baby" "That's all it would take" "And didn't work like that" "There are many reasons why an embryo might develop badly, but in April's case her doctors think there's a problem with the cytoplasm, the jelly that bathes the nucleus of each egg" "when April's embryos develop, instead of dividing symmetrically into a round ball of cells, as a normal embryo would, they start to develop abnormally, and then disintegrate" "Hi, honey, how're you feeling?" "Fine" "Yeah?" "They could try using donor eggs from another woman, but April and John feel that it's very important that their child contains both their genes" "So they're going to try a highly experimental approach" "It's gonna work..." "This is our last shot at having our own child" "Not that I would have a problem having- y'know, using donor eggs," "I mean, that's definitely a possibility, but if I had... my choice" "I would, you know, want this to work out" "So it's, y'know, very important" "First, Cytoplasmic jelly is sucked out of another woman's egg and then injected into April's egg" "This jelly contains some DNA and nutrients which power the cell's activities" "April's doctors are hoping that the donor's cytoplasm will jump-start cell division in April's egg" "It's controversial, not least because it means that any baby produced this way will be a kind of genetic cocktail containing DNA from three people:" "John, April and the donor" "The catheter will come in from the side of the screen and the embryos will be drawn up into the catheter..." "Several days later, doctors have four embryos to return to April ...very good... going to make some adjustments to the screen here, now we're- can go ahead and get these embryos back where they belong" "Hi, hun" "Hi" "How're you feeling?" "Yeah, let's see 'em..." "Cool" "So we can cut these things up if it does work and send them out for Christmas cards?" "Yeah, there you go" "There you go Send it to our parents, here's your grand kids:" "This is what they look like" "Hey he looks good, yeah he does - he?" "Maybe it's a she, who knows?" "I'm all?" "Honey, I just don't expect it not to work this time," "I think it's gonna work" "Sadly, it didn't work." "Yet again, the embryos failed to develop" "April's problems start here with the egg" "Once a month, in a shower of fluid, an egg bursts out of the ovary and begins its journey down the Fallopian tube" "Because it's a single cell, holding the answer to a great many reproductive and genetic problems, the egg is intensively researched" "The egg is in limited supply" "At birth, a girl has roughly a million eggs in her ovaries, but they have already started to die off" "By puberty, only a quarter of a million eggs are left" "During her fertile years, one will be released each month, and by her menopause almost all her eggs will have gone" "The ovaries age much faster than the rest of the body, and the eggs inside them seem to deteriorate" "Genetic defects like Down's Syndrome become much more common as a woman, and her eggs, age Fertility is also drastically reduced" "So is there any way to slow this ageing process?" "One way some doctors are trying to keep ovaries young and fresh is by removing and preserving part of them" "This young woman has cancer and she's having ovarian tissue removed to try to protect it from the anti-cancer drugs she has to take" "Removing ovarian tissue is easy enough" "Freezing and preserving it is also relatively simple" "The problem comes when you take it out of the freezer and try to put it back" "Belly-dancer, Margaret Lloyd-Hart, is the first woman in the world to have her frozen ovarian tissue put back into her body" "Margaret's ovaries were surgically removed for medical reasons, but as a result she had an early menopause when I realised how badly my life had been impacted, I needed to do something and I was wondering if it would be possible to get it put back in again " "maybe there is a doctor out there who can do it" "And I knew that it had never been done before" "Margaret began her own quest to find someone who would re-implant her frozen ovaries" "Her search took her to New York, where she finally found a doctor willing to operate" "She'd heard about some trial operations done on sheep" "They had actually taken their ovarian tissue out and frozen it and put it back in" "And it had some good success" "And I thought that looked hopeful, but it hadn't been done on humans yet, and that was the scary part" "In February 1999," "Margaret became the first person to try this highly experimental surgery" "Her ovarian tissue was defrosted, then surgically re-implanted into her body using a laparascopic cannula" "Once inside her body, the string of ovarian tissue was manoeuvred into place" "For months, Margaret waited in New York having a daily round of scans and hormone injections" "Finally, after seven months, her scan showed that the re-implanted tissue had started to produce follicles or egg sacs we were doing the sonogram and we noticed this dark area and y'know both the doctor and technician thought that" "it might be a follicle re-growing" "So the next time we came in it seemed to be getting bigger, and both of them seemed to be convinced that it really was, and we were really excited" "It was humbling because we were in the presence of a miracle" "Margaret's re-implanted ovarian tissue meant that in theory she could become pregnant using IVF" "One thing we've certainly shown through this is that you can mature a follicle to a certain stage and then retrieve the egg and then fertilise that" "So I am glad that I have the option now" "I have an option that I didn't have a few months ago" "Margaret, however, soon discovered her follicles only developed if stimulated by large amounts of drugs" "Convinced that they were making her feel unwell, she abandoned the experiment" "But there is another approach, and it may in the long term offer much greater benefits" "Until now, scientists have been concentrating on ways to grow eggs inside a woman's body" "But why not try to grow eggs outside the body?" "Like growing plants from seed, growing eggs outside the body will only be possible when researchers have found the right genes, food and conditions for the eggs to develop work is progressing fast and many of the technical problems" "have started to be cracked" "Being able to grow human eggs as easily as we now harvest mushrooms would benefit a wide range of people:" "Cancer patients, who wanted to avoid exposing their eggs to chemotherapy;" "Or women who wanted to delay getting pregnant would be able to store ovarian tissue and have their eggs matured later" "But the greatest advantage would be for routine IVF, making it much simpler women would no longer need to take expensive drugs, nor to attend hospital for endless monitoring" "Growing eggs outside the body would also help research in another area which people feel passionate about" "Scientists are trying to find out if they can make human tissue for transplantation using eggs or embryos" "Opponents, however, see this as nothing more than using embryos as spare parts" "This is what the argument's about:" "A six-day old embryo" "Some of the cells in this embryo have the potential to develop into any part of the body" "From one cell you could grow new brain tissue to treat Parkinson's, or cardiac tissue to repair a heart" "And ultimately, perhaps, even limbs" "This rat arm has been grown in culture from a rat embryo, but would we want to go this far and try to grow human limbs and organs from the cells of human embryos?" "Growing limbs in test-tubes is really the stuff of horror films" "There's an old myth about a Frankenstein - like creature called the Golem which sums up the dilemma that experimenting with human eggs and embryos poses" "According to Jewish legend, a rabbi made a Golem, a fantastically powerful creature, out of clay and water" "The recipe for making a Golem is there on the wall" "The rabbi made the Golem with the best of intentions:" "To help people" "Once he'd been assembled, the rabbi brought the Golem to life by putting the Hebrew words of truth into an amulet on its chest" "The Golem is like the Frankenstein myth, but much older" "The common theme to both is the monster whose powers, once unleashed, even its creators are unable to control" "These stories are so powerful because they tap right into a common and very reasonable fear:" "The fear that once we begin to mess with the beginnings of life, even with the best of intentions, we run risks" "But these fears need to be kept in perspective" "At the moment, what can be done is both very limited and not very successful" "Mixing April's eggs with donor cytoplasm didn't get her pregnant" "It didn't work" "It just didn't take" "It just did not take there was no pregnancy" "Maybe because of the manipulation, maybe because it just- there was a problem- they- honestly, they couldn't tell us any reason why," "and there's really no way to determine a reason, exact reason" "April and John are now having a further round of conventional IVF treatment using donor eggs in the hope that this will give them the baby they so desperately want" "Back in England, ten days have passed since Pete and Fiona had their embryos transferred" "Fiona had a pregnancy test and now they're anxious to hear if the treatment's worked" "Hello?" "Hello, is that Mrs. Hingston?" "Yes" "It's Stuart Labour here at the Hammersmith" "Hello" "How are you?" "Not too bad we've just had the result of your blood test come through" "Right." "And the result is a very weak Positive" "Right." "So really what we need to do is to repeat the test in a week's time to see what's happening" "All right then" "All right?" "Yeah" "OK, Mrs. Hingston" "Thanks very much" "If you've got any worries, then just give us a call here at the Hammersmith" "Yeah, will do OK" "Thank you All right" "Bye." "Bye-bye." "Bye what did he say?" "It's slightly positive" "At least it's not 'no'" "But unfortunately, her embryo didn't take" "we got told the phone call would be about 3 o'clock, and the phone rang at half past two, and it was:" "Who was going to go and answer the phone" "And in the end I went and answered it" "And it was the result we wanted, telling us that we were going to have another pregnancy" "Started buying a few things" "And I started painting a mural on the wall in the baby's bedroom, and tried to make it into a new bedroom for a new baby, really, 'cause we'd always called it Joshua's room" "we didn't have any hope before, but now we've got hope, something to look forward to for the future" "Sue and Chris are lucky." "PGD only works at roughly 18% of attempts" "So might there be a more effective way that scientists could use their increasing knowledge of genetics?" "Perhaps scientists have been looking at the wrong thing" "They've been concentrating on the egg because it is relatively speaking large and easy to manipulate" "But eggs are fragile and in limited supply" "Embryos are even more precious and work with them raises a lot of ethical difficulties for society" "But there is a blindingly obvious alternative" "After all, it takes two elements to make a baby" "The answer may be sperm" "One thing most men are good at is producing sperm" "In the course of watching this programme, so far, women in their child-bearing years will have lost on average three eggs" "Men, on the other hand, will have produced two million sperm, each one carrying half the genetic information needed to make a child:" "An inexhaustible and easily tapped supply" "Men produce sperm from puberty into old age" "A man can often father a child until the day he dies, and every sperm he makes during that lifetime carries a genetic blueprint when doctors do genetic screening for Cystic Fibrosis, they wait till the sperm has fertilised the egg" "and test the embryo that develops" "But why wait until you've got an embryo?" "Why not go back a stage further?" "Why not change the genetic material of the sperm?" "It's hugely controversial with massive implications" "The sperm that is ejaculated during orgasm is actually three months old, and it's the final stage of a non-stop factory generating and maturing sperm at the rate of 1,000 a second" "Inside the testes are thousand of pipes:" "The tubules within these are millions of germ cells whose job is to produce sperm to a genetic blueprint" "If we change that blueprint, the genetic make-up of the sperm is changed for ever, and so would be the genetic blueprint of any human conceived by those sperm" "Scientists may one day be able to stop diseases being inherited by manipulating sperm" "At the moment, they're trying to work out how to do that using mice" "Supposing you wanted to make mice that glowed in the dark?" "What you might do is to take the fluorescent gene from a jelly-fish and inject it into the testes of a mouse" "If that gene got into the cells which make the sperm, then something dramatic might happen" "lts children would inherit the glowing gene, and so would their children and their children's children:" "You'd have a new strain of mouse, because what you'd have done is to change their genetic make-up for ever" "The point of developing this form of genetic engineering is not of course to produce novelty mice" "The point is to save human lives" "The sort of people it might help are people like those here in Sardinia" "In this Mediterranean island, one in eight people carry the gene for a dreadful inherited disease" "Each June, Sardinians hold a festival which is something of a fertility rite" "Traditionally, these lassooers are allowed to kiss anyone they catch, but courtship here has a darker side" "It spells the possibility of two carriers getting together and having a sick child" "Even amid the festivities, the Mamatones with their ancient masks seem to reflect the island's blight" "No one knows what the demonic features really represent, or the origins of the dance, but with their high foreheads and sunken cheeks they show a marked similarity to something else that's been in this island since recorded time" "All the children on this ward have Beta-thallasemia, an inherited and lethal blood disease" "Their lives revolve around this hospital" "Their bodies can't make normal red blood cells, so every two to three weeks they need a lengthy blood transfusion" "If it's left untreated, Betathallasemia causes bone deformation, multiple illnesses and early death" "Even with the high level of care these children are getting, life expectancy is short" "Betathallasemia is the world's most widespread genetic defect" "Hundreds of millions across the globe carry this terrible gene" "These days all pregnant women on the island are routinely tested and almost all opt for abortion if they find that they are carrying a baby with the disease" "It's a huge emotional cost for people in this Catholic country, and a huge economic burden" "At the moment, screening is the most effective weapon that modern medicine has against genetic disease" "But even screening can fail" "Manuelli has Betathallasemia" "His mother, Faviana, knew she was a carrier of the gene, but when they got married her husband thought he wasn't" "He said that he wasn't because tests he'd had showed that he wasn't" "Then when I became pregnant with Manuelli, we did more tests to put our mind at rest so as to be completely sure, and that's when we discovered that he, too, was a carrier." "Manuelli is currently waiting for a bone marrow transplant" "It's the only thing that offers any hope to children who have Betathallasemia" "But suitable donors are rare and it doesn't always work" "Despite their best efforts, the gene that causes Betathallasemia goes on being handed down from father to son, and there's nothing we can currently do which will change that" "For thousands of years, civilisations on Sardinia have lived with Betathallasemia" "The island now employs every tactic modern medicine has to offer, but as things currently stand," "Sardinians like Manuelli, and his family will go on passing the gene that causes Betathallasemia down the generations" "One day there might be a radical solution to this problem, but it requires a huge leap into the unknown" "It would involve replacing the defective Thallasemia gene in carriers of the disease while they were still very young" "The way it could work in somewhere like Sardinia, is that all the boy babies would have healthy genes injected into their testes" "As they grow up, they might produce sperm that's free of disease" "If it worked, the babies of these children would be permanently changed, as would their children's children" "The different elements necessary to make such a thing work are coming together work around the world shows that such a thing is likely to be possible" "Put like that, it sounds simple" "In fact, there are enormous practical and ethical problems to be overcome" "we humans are products of millions of years of gradual change" "Altering a single gene may have catastrophic implications that we just can't predict what's worse, such mistakes might not emerge for many generations" "Genetic mutations have often survived in people because they offer their carrier some other benefit" "The Betathallasemia gene protects its carrier against malaria, at one time a major killer in Sardinia" "The interconnected nature of genes is one of the things that makes changing them such a risky business" "And people are also concerned that if genetic engineering becomes available, someone will create designer babies" "There may be combinations of genes which predispose people to greater beauty or intelligence" "The idea that one day those with enough money could buy these attributes for their children is at the heart of many people's fears about genetics" "Developments in genetics offer hope and threat, as do many of the emerging technologies we've featured in this series whether it's transplanting arms, or injecting genes into hearts to grow new blood vessels, there are dangers" "Superhuman medicine is dragging us, kicking and screaming, into a brave new world" "One for which few of us are yet fully prepared" "All human progress involves taking risks, but it also brings opportunities" "Change is happening faster than ever before, and in the coming decades, society will have to learn how to control the power of these new technologies if they are to be used to improve the lives of all of us" "After all, this is what technological advances should be about" "I can see about that much of the baby's face" "Beautiful" "Technology has allowed Sue and Chris to have a new baby son, Ethan, who they can welcome into the world confident he doesn't have Cystic Fibrosis and that the heart-ache they previously suffered won't be repeated" "Our medical advances are being developed in the hope that all little superhumans like him will have the best chance there is to live a happy, healthy life"