Sibling Selection
June 26, 2001 -- Parents of sick children will go to great lengths to find something that will save them. Some are even willing to have another child in hopes of creating a match who can donate healthy blood cells for the sick sibling.
Advances in research now make it possible to virtually guarantee parents such a match. But ethics experts worry that the potential good comes at too great a price.
Case in point: Parents of a girl born with a rare, incurable disease -- called Fanconi's anemia -- underwent a controversial procedure to conceive another child who could help cure their daughter. Embryos harvested from in vitro fertilization, or IVF, were tested for signs of the gene responsible the disease. Embryos that did not carry the genetic abnormality underwent further testing to isolate those that would be a safe donor match for the girl.
In Fanconi's anemia, which typically strikes children, the bone marrow fails to produce blood cells normally. Available treatments only can reduce complications of the disease. People with this disease die, on average, in their early 20s.
After four IVF attempts, the mother gave birth to a healthy boy. Blood from his umbilical cord was infused into his sister shortly after he was born last year.
Both children are now fine, and the girl, Molly Nash, is healthy and attending school. Her parents, who are both carriers of the anemia gene, have said they had planned to have more children and that this allowed them to have another healthy child, who they named Adam, while at the same time providing a donor for Molly.
"I don't think there's any negative about this," says Yury Verlinsky, PhD, lead author of a report about the case in the June 27 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association. "I think it's completely ethical, more ethical than anything that can be done in this situation."
But many do question parents choosing to bear a child free of disease for the purpose of being a donor. Others wonder how far away we are from choosing traits such as eye color or personality.