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Let parents decide

Nature volume 464, pages 978–979 (2010)Cite this article

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Twenty years on from the first pregnancies after preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Alan Handyside argues that informed prospective parents are largely good guides to the use of the thriving technology.

Twenty years ago this month, my colleagues and I published a paper in Nature describing how our small team at Hammersmith Hospital in London helped to bring about the first pregnancies following preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). We used the technique in several couples. They risked having children with serious inherited diseases linked to the X chromosome that typically affect boys, such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy. After fertilizing the eggs in vitro and testing to identify gender, we implanted only unaffected female embryos.

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  1. Alan Handyside is at the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre, London SE1 9RY, UK. ahandyside@thebridgecentre.co.uk ,

    Alan Handyside

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  1. Alan Handyside
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Competing interests

Alan Handyside has a patent application for a method of analysing SNP data from single cells, and the clinic at the London Bridge Fertility, Gynaecology and Genetics Centre where he works has a private lab (Bridge Genoma) for PGD testing. He is also an unpaid consultant with Reprogenetics, a PGD-testing lab in West Orange, New Jersey, USA.

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Handyside, A. Let parents decide. Nature 464, 978–979 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/464978a

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