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.

The technique involves fertilising eggs in a laboratory. When the embryos are three days old, scientists take out a cell from it and analyse it. If they find that the cell has an abnormal chromosome, the embryo is discarded as it will lead to babies with genetic defects.

But the Los Angeles clinic is now extending the PGD technique from detecting genetic diseases to trait selection. Steinberg says his clinic learnt how to use it for genetic traits like eye colour while trying to screen out albinism.

Many fertility experts are outraged that the clinic is seeking to capitalise on dramatic advances in embryo cell analysis designed to identify dangerous diseases and defects in the unborn. They say that the offered service is distracting public attention from how the pioneering medical technology can have children free of debilitating genetic conditions.

"It's seeing babies as commodities," Dr Michael Grodin, Director of Medical Ethics at Boston University's School of Public Health told a Canadian news service. "The question is whether we'll see babies meeting the fantasies or interests of the family, the parents, rather than seeing babies for what they are in and of themselves."

After the protests, the clinic has limited its offer to families with a history of genetic diseases. According to Steinberg, people seeking the PGD treatment want their babies to be free from genetic illness.

''To deny them the ability to do that when the technology is there is to me unethical,'' he was quoted as saying by an Australian wire service.