BRITAIN: The first officially sanctioned "designer baby" in British history was given the go-ahead last night, a move which pushes yet further at the boundaries of medical ethics.
If the birth is successful it will be the first child born with the blessing of Britain's human fertilisation and embryology authority (HFEA), which agreed to the procedure.
Shahana and Raj Hashmi's son Zain suffers from thalassaemia, an inherited blood disorder. Without a bone marrow transplant, his outlook is bleak, and no compatible match has been found within the family or in the national donor pool. The Hashmis, of Leeds, in the north of England, want to undergo conventional IVF treatment to have a baby, but with two differences.
The embryos produced will be screened twice before any are implanted in Shahana's womb: once to make sure that any baby born will not suffer from thalassaemia, and once to be sure that the baby's genes make it a compatible donor for Zain.
"Zain is not well. He is very poorly," said Mr Simon Fishel of the Care fertility clinic in Nottingham which will carry out the British end of the joint UK-US procedure.
"He's going to be possibly up and down and may continue like that but his quality of life is grim. At best, he may live to his late 20s with this cocktail of drugs and transfusions. So yes, it's acute. I do believe it's a question of saving Zain and not just saving his quality of life."
Last week, a baby girl genetically pre-selected to be a compatible donor for her brother, a recovering leukaemia patient, was born in a British hospital. The parents of that child - who have asked not to be named - underwent almost the entire IVF and screening procedure in the US, and thus did not need the permission of the HFEA.
The Hashmis will undergo IVF treatment at the Care clinic. When the embryos produced have grown to the eight-cell stage, a single cell will be removed from each and the cells flown to the US where they will be compared with genetic markers sampled from the family some months ago.
If one or two of the embryos are both non-thalassaemic and a good tissue match, they will be implanted in Shahana's womb.
Assuming all goes well with the pregnancy, when the baby is born, blood will be taken from its umbilical cord and frozen. Cells from this cord blood will provide the replacement for Zain's bone marrow.
Screening embryos for positive genetic characteristics has drawn criticism from the anti-abortion lobby and others who believe that it is wrong to bring a child into the world for anyone's benefit but its own.
Others warn that permitting embryo selection for donor compatability is the first step on a slippery slope leading to selection for "beauty" or "intelligence".
Peter Garrett, of the UK anti-abortion group Life, said: "Should we allow a child to be manufactured in order to serve the medical needs of an older brother? Whilst the term 'designer baby' is often overused, it is all too appropriate in this case."
However both the Hashmis - who have sold their story to a restricted group of media outlets - and the couple who have already had a genetically-screened baby argue that they are not "designing."
"All we're asking is a helping hand by the scientists," Mrs Hashmi told the British independent television channel, ITV, last year.