Think Pinker

According to the BBC, next week in London a woman will give birth to the first baby free of the altered genes that cause breast cancer. That’s real news!

The woman who will give birth to this baby isn’t herself a high risk but her husband’s family has seen breast cancer as early as their 20’s and it’s three generations deep for sure. That meant their daughter would have had anywhere from a 50% to an 80% risk of developing breast cancer. That’s frightening.

The process involved a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis that takes a cell from an embryo at the eight cell development stage (3 days old) and then testing it. If the embryo has the gene it can be eradicated eliminating the baby’s risk of ever developing breast cancer. However, the experts do still warn that this is not a solution for all couples.

It was first in 2006 that the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority did their first test for breast cancer on an embryo. In this case fertility expert Paul Serhal from the University College Hospital was treating the couple who did not know whether they’d be having a boy or a girl, but they wanted to be sure that their child would never have to face this terrible disease. The husband had already seen his cousin, sister, mother, and grandmother suffer from this dreadful disease. And while a son may not have developed breast cancer he would have been able to pass it on to his daughters.

While preventing a child from every having to face breast cancer is great there is more to this procedure and that is that it can stop the disease from being passed from one generation to the next effectively eliminating it from that family. By eliminating the mutant gene they can eliminate pain and suffering in the future.