Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton.

  • Harsanyi, Zsolt, 1944-
Date:
[1981], ©1981
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetic prophecy : beyond the double helix / Zsolt Harsanyi, Richard Hutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Prologue should think twice before she has any more children. She already has a nine-year-old son. She wants to know: Is he in any danger? • The counselors discuss a couple in which the husband is a hemophiliac. Because any daughter he sires must be a carrier of the condition, the couple has decided to have children by artificial insemination. But they have also resolved not to tell their children of their unknown heritage, mainly because of family pressures. One of their two children is a girl, 18 months old. When she is ready to have a family of her own, she will undoubt¬ edly undergo genetic screening, knowing of her father's condition. She will learn that she does not carry the trait for hemophilia, and therefore that she cannot possibly be her father's daughter. The parents do not yet understand the problem. They still view their child as a baby who must be protected, and not as the tem¬ plate of a mature young woman. Those who come to this clinic undergo the same basic process as they would in any genetic screening. First, they provide a sample that can be tested. In this case, it is blood or amniotic fluid; other tests in other clinics might require a urine sample or a tiny swatch of skin. Then they go home and the laboratory begins its work, subjecting the sample to dozens of tests to discover the kinds of products its genes are producing, and, by inference, the kinds of genes the sample contains. When the patients return to the clinic a counselor will sit with them and explain the test results. For these pro¬ spective parents, the tests can reveal a great deal about the genetic health of their unborn children. In other clinics, workers may find out whether they are vulnerable to certain chemicals in their environment, patients may discover that [ 5 ]