What are designer babies?
Designer babies are those born from in-vitro fertilization (IVF) embryos chosen for their presence or lack of specific genes, or those born from pre-implantation embryos with genetic alterations made in an effort to influence the characteristics the offspring would have. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD)-selected embryos are used to generate designer babies, or the traits of the offspring are tweaked genetically. The main goal of designing infants is to prevent heritable disorders that are caused by DNA mutations from affecting them. Adam Nash, who was born in 2000 via in vitro fertilization with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, a method used to choose desired traits, is regarded as the first designer child. In order to prevent and cure genetic flaws that lead to disease, CRISPR designer babies are produced by altering DNA fragments. The most recent application of CAS9, a unique technology that can add or remove specific kinds of genes from a DNA molecule, was f...