Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Stanford's Barry Behr Discuses New Embryo Screening Procedure

On the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 2, Barry Behr, Ph.D. – articulate and straight-talking head of Stanford University's in vitro fertilization (IVF) lab as well as of the Huntington Reproductive Center, the Western U.S.’s largest IVF program – will be talking to us about PGD, a relatively new and rapidly advancing procedure sometimes accompanying IVF, in which a single cell – or, sometimes, two – is teased from a living 3-day-old, roughly 8-cell embryo. PGD allows early embryos’ genetic characteristics to be analyzed so that IVF patients and practitioners can decide which ones to implant into the mother's uterus.

PGD can be done only in conjunction with IVF, but the latter is becoming a mainstream event. Close to 400,000 IVF procedures are now performed annually. In countries such as Denmark, where health insurance grows on trees, IVF babies now account for at least 4% of births. In the United States, where IVF’s hefty costs are often paid directly by patients, this figure predictably shrinks to 1%. But even here, as throughout the developed world where couples increasingly defer childbearing until natural conception becomes difficult (one in eight couples in industrial countries has fertility problems), the percentage in affluent urban enclaves is significantly higher.

PGD’s original purpose was to select disease-free embryos from parents at high risk of transmitting serious genetic disorders, then transfer only the least-risky embryos to mom’s womb. In recent years, however, that application has been dwarfed by another: screening embryos of prospective parents troubled by infertility, most typically because mom’s advanced age puts those embryos at high risk for abnormal chromosomal counts. However, this year a major study suggested that using PGD to increase healthy pregnancies among older women is not supported by actual data. Indeed, the procedure seems to lead to a lower, not higher, rate of healthy births.

Now for the sci-fi twist: New technologies may soon make it possible to extend PGD's predictive power to include late-onset, low-penetrance conditions – and, in so doing, to open up an ethical can of worms. (Do you really want to screen out an otherwise perfectly viable embryo because your genetic test predicts, say, a 30% risk of acquiring at age 40 or 50 a disease that, however intractable now, may be totally treatable by the time that little embryo gets old enough to contract it – if he or she does contract it? For that matter, what’s to stop parents from having their embryos screened for obesity? height? hirsuteness? risk-taking proclivities? gregariousness? intelligence? Where do you stop?)

We’ll be sure to leave enough time at the end of Dr. Behr’s talk to explore PGD’s potentials and discuss some of the contentious issues surrounding the procedure.

Dinner: King Fish Restaurant
201 South B Street, San Mateo, Ca. 94401

A menu will be provided from which diners can select an entree of either Kingfish Jambalaya, Roasted Sonoma Chicken Wellington, Pan Roasted King Salmon, or Vegetarian Pasta Dish in Olive Oil. Appetizers, bread and butter, a salad and dessert (Chocolate Decadence) will also be served, along with coffee and tea - hot or iced.

LOCATION: Kingfish is located at the intersection of South B Street and 2nd Avenue in Downtown San Mateo, California off of Highway 101. For Directions

COST:

$30.00 Member/Guest

$20.00 Student Please pay by Check

Please note that you do not need to have an account at Paypal. If you want you can pay with your credit card through Paypal's secure site.

SEND CHECKS, MADE OUT TO NCSWA, BY SEPTEMBER 29 TO:

Lynn Yarris
926 Carmel Ave.
Albany, CA 94706