LA clinic offers 'designer babies' for $18,000

06 March 2009

Raising a storm of protest and criticism, a Los Angeles fertility clinic has started offering 'designer babies' where the parents can choose physical characteristics like skin, hair, and eye colour – all for as little as $18,000.

The Los Angeles Fertility Institutes, run by Dr Jeff Steinberg who played a key role in the birth of the world's first test-tube baby Louise Brown in Britain in 1978, says it is ready to deliver the first ''designer baby'' next year.

Using a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the clinic says it will allow would-be parents to choose the gender, skin, eye and hair colour and other physical traits of their babies. This service will be available only to couples seeking in-vitro fertilization (IVF), according to the clinic which has branches in New York and Mexico.

The institute, which has been using the PGD technique for gender selection for several years with a claimed success rate of more than 99 per cent, says it will now extend it to choose genetic traits of offspring. However, there will be no guarantees about 100 per cent success, it says.

Steinberg's clinic, the world's largest provider of the process of gender choice, says it has received ''five or six'' requests from couples for the new service which involves embryo selection, not genetic modification. It expects the first trait-selected baby to be born next year.

The PGD technique has been used in clinics since the 1990s to check embryos for inherited genes with life-threatening diseases. The embryos with faulty genes are discarded and only healthy ones are implanted in the mother's womb.