Scientists are on a mission to reassure the public about the advances in technology and the prospect of ‘designer babies’ by promoting the benefits to the human race.
Helen O’Neill, a molecular geneticist at University College London, believes disease could one day be irradiated through genetic modification.
Dr O’Neill calls this ‘homo-shapeans’ – which see humans developed in our perfect shape.
She said: “There are endless capacities when it comes to gene editing.”
One way of editing genes would be using the CRISPR, or CRISPR-Cas9, which sees scientists edit a specific part of the genome by altering DNA, she said.
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One way gene editing can be used for would to help eradicate central nervous system disease such as Huntington’s, Dementia, Parkinson’s.
To do this, scientists may one day be able to take the gene out of a body, find the mutation, fix it and put it back.
Speaking at the New Scientist Live exhibition in London, Dr O’Neill said: “We can take your blood cells, we fix them and reinsert them back in to you.”
However, there may not be a need to do this in the future as children could be given the ideal start to life.
The molecular geneticist believes scientists are extremely close to creating a full map of the human genome – which she says is extremely hard and that we know more about the origins of pigs and flys than we do us.
When scientists do, she continued, babies will be treated from birth to eradicate disease.
Dr O’Neill said: “Soon every baby will have every letter of its genome read on the day it is born so we can tailor medication for them.”
And for those concerned the practice is unethical and could lead to ‘designer babies’, Dr O’Neill told the audience: “It would be clinically negligent to have the information but not allow the treatment when we will know exactly what they will need.”