Dr Jeffrey Steinberg is the Cambridge University graduate who founded the Fertility Institute in Los Angeles after more than 40 years experience in the field and he hopes to one day be able to help couples reach their ultimate goal. His team currently uses In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), to monitor and stimulate the ovulatory procedure in a lab situation to oversee every step of the process and identify any chromosomes that may pose a problem. This is a technique which has gained popularity since the first successful treatment in 1978 and was designed for patients suffering from fertility complication.
However, Amazon Prime’s “Tomorrow’s World” documentary revealed how Dr Steinbeg’s clinic wants to open up the doors to much more.
The narrator said in 2018: “Situated in a wealthy suburban town, the Fertility Institutes is a private IVF clinic is like so many others in the US.
“But there’s one difference, most of its patients have no fertility problems.
“They have recourse to medicine only to control their procreation as much as possible.
Dr Steinberg claims he will be able to customise babies (Image: GETTY/AMAZON)
Dr Jeffrey Steinberg is a Cambridge graduate (Image: AMAZON)
Come back in a few years and we can get eye and hair colour four you
“This clinic is run by Dr Jeffrey Steinberg, who’s practiced IVF for 40 years and for $25,000 (£20,000) he offers wealthy couples an accurate diagnosis of their embryos.
“His technique is used to detect hundreds of more or less serious diseases.”
Dr Steinberg then justified why he offers such treatment.
He said: “Now, with the same technology, we can determine over 2,000 diseases, and we’re learning more and more every day, any disease that we learn the genetic cause of, we can identify.
“It started off simply with things like Tay-Sach disease and haemophilia, and it’s progressed now to very complete genetic diseases.
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The lab in Los Angeles is helping couples (Image: AMAZON)
“The potential for this method is unlimited and I think it’s going to go very far.
“Right now, even people that object to it we can make an objection with if we say we will be able to identify who’s going to get prostate cancer, who’s going to get breast cancer, which we can already do.
“Who has the nerve to say don’t do that? No one.”
However, Dr Steinberg also offers another type of diagnosis.
The narrator explained: “For a few years, Dr Steinberg’s offer has been going even further, thanks to another test, embryo sex selection.
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The team is using IVF treatment currently (Image: AMAZON)
Dr Steinberg showed how chromosones are viewed (Image: AMAZON)
“Patients can choose the sex of their child – two X chromosomes for a girl, an X and Y chromosome for a boy.
“But Dr Steinberg would like to extend the application of his diagnosis.
“His next goal will be to enable his patients to choose their baby’s eye and hair colours.
“For the time being, though, religious lobbies are firmly against it, but Dr Steinberg believes it is just a matter of time as demand gets higher and higher.”
Dr Steinberg explained how he completes this treatment.
Dr Steinberg helps to develp the treatment (Image: GETTY)
He added: “We now know that a red [signal] automatically means the Y chromosome – male.
“The green [signal] automatically means the X chromosome.
“The blue [signal] is for chromosome 18, which is Edwards syndrome.
“So here we can see a healthy girl, with no syndrome and here’s a healthy boy too.”
Dr Steinberg continued, laying out his futuristic plan.
He concluded: “They [parents] come in here and tell us about all of their hopes and dreams.
“They tell us how tall they want them to be, they tell us about what eye colour they want them to have, what hair colour and what gender they want them to be.
“We say ‘listen, we’re happy to get the boy or the girl, come back in a few years and we can get eye and hair colour for you.”
Editing embryos, germ cells and the idea of designer babies is the subject of ethical debate, as a result of the implications in modifying genomic information in a heritable manner.
Despite regulations set by individual countries’ governing bodies, the absence of a standardised regulatory framework leads to frequent discourse in the discussion of germline engineering among scientists, ethicists and the general public.
Arthur Caplan, the head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University suggests that establishing an international group to set guidelines for the topic would greatly benefit global discussion and proposes instating “religious and ethics and legal leaders” to impose well-informed regulations.
In many countries, editing embryos and germline modification for reproductive use are illegal, and the US still restricts the use or modification as of 2018.
Since genetic modification poses risk to any organism, researchers and medical professionals must give the prospect of germline engineering careful consideration.
The main ethical concern is that these types of treatments will produce a change that can be passed down to future generations and therefore any error, known or unknown, will also be passed down and will affect the offspring.