Sex Of Baby Can Be Selected

A high-tech method to select a baby’s sex was developed by the U.S. scientists. Britain’s daily newspaper The Times reported on Thursday that scientists at the Genetics and IVF Institute in Fairfax, Virginia, have succeeded in determining a baby’s sex by attaching a kind of `genetic mark` to the sperm’s chromosome through the sperm sorting machine, created by the institute.

This institute recently announced at a conference held at Rosen, Switzerland, that it developed a technique that can externally fertilizes the sperm that has a `mark` with ovum and then implant the fertilized egg after determining the sex of the fertilized egg. The institute announced that it is 92 percent effective for couples wanting a girl and 72 percent for boys. Other existing methods have 50 percent of success rate.

However, The Times reported that this technique is highly susceptible to the ethical criticism. Especially, gynecologists are questioning whether this technique is safe to the fetus. However, it was reported that more than 200 couples had selected the baby’s sex by using this technique worldwide. The experts anticipate that more people will use this technique since it takes only 3-4 hours to apply this technique, and it costs about $ 2000 (2.6 million won).

Kwon Ki-Tae kkt@donga.com