July 5th, 2007 at 10:42 pm
The New York Times reports that older women who have their embryos screened for viability actually decrease their chances of pregnancy, a study in France has found. It seems instead of culling the unviable, the testing harms the embryos.
“The way they performed this process tells us that they did not have a lot of expertise in this,” said Dr. Anna P. Ferraretti, scientific director of the Italian Society for the Study of Reproductive Medicine.Dr. Ferraretti and others said the researchers had sometimes taken one cell to biopsy from a four-cell embryo, earlier than is standard procedure for pregenetic testing.
Yeah, losing 25% of one’s entire genetic tissue probably puts a damper on the whole chance of success thing.
I could almost convince myself that genetic testing might be useful if it would prepare parents for the coming of certain children, but there’s no way to plan even if you have the best intentions. The presence of a genetic “fault” doesn’t give any indication of how much that child will be affected by it. It will be a long time, if ever, for prenatal genetic testing to be useful for any other reason than to prevent a life from being born.
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