DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

I can think of one prerequisite...

http://www.betterhumans.com/Features/Ask_an_Expert/answer.aspx?articleID=2004-01-28-3

When might gene therapy be available to alter eye color?
While this will almost certainly be possible soon, we must ask whether it would be safe and justified
Answered by Theodore Friedmann
1/28/2004 • Hits: 119 • Comments: 0

How long before we can use gene therapy to change our eye color?

Brooke Fiechter
Indianapolis, Indiana, USA

This is a question loaded with scientific and ethical issues, and perhaps a far better question might be whether this is the kind of genetic change we would like to engineer into our offspring.

The current gene transferring technology is not ripe enough for this or any other enhancement purpose, and there certainly would need to be a great improvement in gene transferring technology before this could be done effectively and safely.

Whether it would be permanent or not depends on how the genetic manipulation is carried out, into which cells the new gene is put and how the gene is regulated. It could be permanent or transient.

With respect to the genes involved, the determination of eye color is a complex result of the actions of a number of genes on different chromosomes in the human. It's not a single gene trait. And so just how one could manipulate the expression of those several genes to produce a desired eye color is far from clear.

The methods for carrying out such a change will almost certainly be developed in the foreseeable future, but it's also clear that, for the foreseeable future, we will not know enough about the possible unforeseen deleterious effects of interfering with or modifying human genetic traits. We know how difficult it is to do so effectively and safely even in the case of terrible disease, in which case we are all willing to accept a degree of risk in the name of disease treatment.

It's not at all clear to me that it is justified to go ahead for cosmetic and ethically and socially questionable applications such as eye color manipulations, even once questions of safety are better understood.

Theodore Friedmann is the director of the University of California, San Diego Program in Human Gene Therapy as well as a professor of pediatrics. He and a colleague published a landmark Science paper in 1972 describing the use of viruses to carry normal genes into defective cells. Friedmann has served as a member of the US Congressional Biomedical Ethics Advisory Committee and the California Commission on Human Cloning, and is chairman of the National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee that helps to oversee all gene therapy trials in the US.