victoria beckham british fashion awards

victoria beckham british fashion awards

   05.23       Fashion 2017

---

[ silence ] >> dr. harper: [inaudible]pleasure, pleasure, pleasure for me to behere and to invited to give this lunch hour lecture. and i work at ucl just aroundthe corner, at ucl center for pre-implantation geneticsand diagnosis, and i also work at the crgh, which is thecenter for reproductive and genetics health,which is the ivf unit, the private ivf unit at, atthe eastman dental hospital.

and both of these departmentsfall under the institute for women's health, which is aquite new institute within ucl, and i also helped set up the, the eshra [phonetic] pgdconsortium, which we set up in 1997, and i've beenchair of this for many years, and eshra is theeuropean society for human reproductionand embryology. i'm going to showyou some of the data from the eshra pgdconsortium during my talk.

but i want my talks tobe quite controversial, and i want to give yousome food for thought. so this is what i'mgoing to cover. i'm just going to giveyou the very basics of in vitro fertilization. i wish i could give you awhole lecture about that. there's some really interestingthings that are happening, again, some quitecontroversial things. i'll touch on a very few ofthose, but i'm just going

to give you some basics,and then just a little bit about where we arecurrently with genetic testing and where we're going to go inthe future, and then concentrate on what we do here at ucl,which is pre-implantation, genetic diagnosis wherewe're testing embryos for genetic disease, andthen i'm going to finish off with some ethical thoughtsand also the future, and i hope to leave youwith some food for thought on maybe things thatyou'd like to,

to go read up a littlebit more on. so where did this all start? well, it all startedin the 70's. there were a number ofgroups around the world that were trying to helpinfertile couples have children. so what they wanted to do wascollect the eggs and the sperm and mix them in the laboratory,so in vitro, to generate embryos and then transfer theseback to infertile patients and help them establisha preg, pregnancy.

it was actually, bob edwardshere along with patrick steptoe, but were the first whoactually were successful in getting a delivery,and this was louise brown that was born in 1978. this is a pictureof her at the top with her, her, her own child. and we were all very pleased, everyone in the fieldwas pleased that robert edwards last yearwas awarded the nobel prize.

and this is something that probably affectssome of you in this room. it certainly affected me. this is a picture ofmy son at the bottom. he was born by ivf. he's, he's eight now,and i also have ivf twins that were born afterfrozen embryos. so i'm sure some of you here arealso touched by these things. so how do we do ivf?

well, for ivf, we,the basic procedure that we use is we stimulate thewoman to produce multiple eggs, and when we collect the eggs,i'm, i'm sorry, the laser point. oh, it does work. someone said it didn't work. it does work. good. [laughs] this is the humanegg here, and you should just about see, but you will seethis in the next photos, there's a membranesurrounding the egg.

it's like a shell. we call it the zonapalusida[phonetic]. it's a special blockof protein coat, and these cells areradiating in the cumulus cells which help nourish theegg at the early stages. so we collect these eggs froma woman, normally about eight or ten eggs, we mix it witha prepared sample of sperm, and then we monitorthat in our laboratory and watch the development.

now, in the, in the 197, 1992,the group in brussels led by palermo van sterticum,they developed a technique to help male infertility. so if we have men withvery low sperm counts, or even with no spermin their ejaculate, but they are producingsperm in the testes, which we can aspirate, we cantake these very low numbers of sperm, and we can dothis procedure called icsi. and you'll see here,there's the sperm there.

it's been injected. this is the zonaplusida. here it's being injectedthrough there. it's being pierced intothe center of the egg. we're sucking up someof the cytoplasm here and then depositing,and this here was done by [inaudible] at the clgh. and this, this procedure isused internationally now. is, i don't think there's anyivf unit that's not doing icsi

for male infertility. and as you can see, it's quitea, quite an invasive procedure and quite different to nature. so i, i hope that's probably thefirst food for thought what we, what we're actually doingwith this technology. but in the ivf lab,we'll monitor the embryo if it's created byicsi or by just nicks in the eggs and the sperm. we'll then monitor the embryo.

on day one, we hopeto see fertilization. this is a zygote. this is a, the male andfemale [inaudible] here, and these structures hereare called the polar bodies. they're excess fromthe formation of the egg during myosis. and we'll monitor the embryofor the next few days. they'll start to divide, and this is a two-cell humanembryo, and then a four cell.

and then next day,hopefully on day three, this is a really lovelyeight-cell embryo, and over the next few days, wecan still monitor the embryos, and they performblastocysts, and they will hatch from this zonaplausida, andif they're in the uterus, these are very good embryos,and hopefully they'll implant in the uterus andlead to a pregnancy. as of these stages that inivf we normally transfer the embryos.

we normally transferthem either on day three or what's becoming popular for certain patientsis blastocyst transfer. so let's move ontogenetic testing. we've got the basicsof how we do ivf. well, the molecules of, of lifeof these, the dna, and the dna, as i'm sure you know, ispacked in chromosomes, and it's formed bythis double helix. and the genetic codeis what we want to look

at in genetic testing, andthe genetic code is made up of these basis, these g, c,a, and t, which is shown here, and that's what we'regoing to look at to see whetherthere's a genetic disease or any gene, othergenetic issue. so genetic disease is there canbe chromosome abnormalities. so these are quitegross abnormalities where there's maybe twochromosomes of break, broken and swap aroundtheir genetic material

which is transforcations[phonetic], or there could be other typesof inherited abnormalities with the chromosomes, or wecan be right down at the level of the gene, and there couldbe errors, very small errors, even sometimes just one baseis wrong in the genetic code for a gene, and then wecan see that this leads, this can lead to a disease. and there's three mainways, well, actually, genetics has got much morecomplicated in recent years,

but there's basicallythree main ways that the single-gene disorders that just affect onegene are transmitted. recessive is whereboth the parents have to have a faultygene to be at risk of transmitting thatto their child. so the child will onlyhave the disease if both of the genes are faulty, and that totallyknocks out the gene.

you can get dominantdiseases where just one cup, one of the couplecarry the faulty gene, and these are oftenlate, onset diseases. so the person carryingthe gene may well get that disease later in life. and then exiting diseasesare carried by the mother. these are genes that areabnormal on the x chromosome. they're carried by the motherand by females in the family, but they're transmittedto the males,

and the males can be affected. so that's sort ofgenetic diseases. how we do, do, do wedo the genetic testing? and there's, again,many, many ways. i'm just going to show you themain methods that have been used for genetic testing, andmany of these have been used in the human genomemapping project. so if you want tolook at chromosomes, the gold standardtechnique that has been

around for decadeshas been karyotyping, and this is where we band theindividual chromosomes and look at their banding pattern to see whether the chromosomesare normal or abnormal, but these, this methoddoes not tell us anything about the genes. we can also use a techniquecalled fluorescent institute hybridization, which useslittle fluorescent pieces of dna that bind to specificchromosomes,

and this is a fish image here. these will light up justspecific regions of chromosomes. now, if we want to look atgenes, so if you want to look at a specific gene abnormality, the main technique has beenthe [inaudible] chain reaction, and it's like a molecularphotocopy. it will just copy thesequence of a gene many, many times so then moredetailed analysis can be formed on that product to see what'shappening with those genes.

and something that'sbecoming very, very popular now isactually sequencing. so this picture here is asequencing of a gene, of, of an area of a gene or even anarea of dna that's not coding for a gene, and you can seehere, here's the basis, ttgta, and these peaks are telling usactually what base is present in what position in thatparticular sequence. but what's happeningin the future now, so you can actually seethis, there's lots of dots,

yellow dots on thispicture here, but they're a new technologythat's coming in now is the use of a rays or microchips, andthese arrays can tell us a lot of information about just evenone cell from an individual. and the two techniques ofarray comparative genomic hybridization, or cgh. this is a method where you canlook at all of the chromosomes in a cell in, in one go, andi'll show you some images of that, and the other is a,

a type of array called singlenuclear type polymorphism array, and this is a method wherewe gain a huge amount of information from thatsample that we're looking at. we, we, we look at thechromosomes, but we also look at the genes, and we can findout a lot of information. the trouble with these[inaudible] arrays is at the moment, we really don'tknow how to interpret a lot of the information that we get. so it's, it is being used,brought in very slowly

into the geneticdiagnosis arena, but what this information means,we're still trying to work out. so that's the array cghand [inaudible] arrays. so when can we do it? if a couple have a childor there, there's an adult in the family that we thinkhas got a genetic problem, then we can take some of theirblood and do those genetic tests for the problem we thinkthey've got and see if we can find the geneticreason for the abnormality.

and if we find the geneticabnormality in a family, we may decide to test the restof the family to try and see who else is at risk and, andfind out as much information as we can about thegenetics of that family. we would normally do a pedigreeanalysis where we analyze as many of the family as we can. but there's certain geneticdiseases that are specific or, or certainly very prevalent incertain groups of, of patients and certain countries andcertain ethnic groups in,

in different countries. so, for example, in sardinia,they have a, a, a huge issue with beta thalassemia,which has pockets of, of problemed areasthroughout the world. and so in these populationswhere there at very high risk of a specific geneticdisease, they may do screening where they screen the populationto find out if anyone's at risk. but what's happening more now is that there are certaingroups of,

of cultures that are actuallytesting before marriage. so those, i've heard that thereare several cultures that are, that do arranged marriages. they don't just look at yourfamily and your income, etc., and your, whether you've beento university, they also look at your genetic code and seewhether you're carrying any genetic diseases. i've heard, heard this one,three very different groups of, of, well, different countries

where this is now becomequite common practice. so if this, if we'refinding that the family or an individual is at risk oftransmitting a genetic disease, then the couple have to decidewhat they would like to do, if they want to try andhave a, a family that's free from this disease, andthe main techniques that are offered to them. there are several others,but the main procedure that people would go through ifthey want to have a family with,

without that geneticproblem is an amniocentesis or a chorionic villussampling, and this is done where the person'salready pregnant. so the woman's pregnant. an amniocentesis, we takea bit of the amniotic fluid that surrounds thefetus and tests that, and chorionic villus sampling,we take a bit of the placenta, and we do the genetictesting on that. so the main problem

with prenatal diagnosis is thepregnancy's already established. so if the couple feel thatthis disease is very serious, and they, they do not want totransmit this to their child, they have to decide if they wantto continue with the pregnancy, or whether they want to undergotermination of pregnancy, and for any family,this is a terrible, terrible decisionto have to be in. so this is why pre-implantationgenetic diagnosis, testing the embryo, the earlyembryo before it actually

implants, this is exactly whythis technique was developed. now, pre-implantationgenetic diagnosis. sorry, i meant toturn the lights down. anyway, but here,[inaudible] [laughs]. [background noise] ibelieve that's not easy. no, i can't do that. maybe i can turn the lightsdown, oh, they all turn on. it's great. we are high tech.

sorry, this picture'sa bit dark. so pgd was actually developed at the harrisbooth[phonetic] hospital. so we've been very goodin the u.k. we've got the, the first ivf baby, which wasfrom [inaudible] in cambridge and at the hammersbooth hospitalin 1988 with the first pgd baby, and i hope you canjust about see there. this is an, an oldpicture of us in, in israel at a conferencein the early 90's.

this is alan handiside,who was the embryologist that was involved with the firstpgd, and marilyn monk is here, who was also one of thepioneers that did a lot of the mouse work, andthis is robert winston. i think you all knowwho, what he looks like. so he's, he's there, and he wasthe clinical person involved. that's me actually. this is mark hughes who'salso been very involved. he, he, he's from the u.s.,and he came to the hammersmith

in the early 90's,and he was involved with diagnosing the firstpgd for cystic fibrosis. so now this has spreadthroughout the world, and there's many, many centersthat, that do this procedure. so how do we do it? there's two stages. the couple have togo through ivf. we get the embryos in our lab,and we're going to take out some of the cells from theembryo, and then we're going

to do our single-cell diagnosis. and there's three stagesthat we can take cells. i mentioned when i showed youthe zygote those polar bodies. there's two polar bodies thatare formed during formation of the egg, duringugenesis [phonetic], and these can be taken out, bothof these in polar b, biopsy, they can be taken out, andfrom them we can determine a reflection of whatthe chromosomes and the genes arewithin the egg.

so this will only tell usabout the mother's genes and the mother's chromosomes. it will not tellus anything else about the actualembryo's chromosomes because then we'll havethe paternal contribution. the majority of centershave done this procedure, which is called cleavagestage biopsy, and this is how weoriginally did pgd, and it's still the most commonprocedure today, and i'm going

to show you a video ofhow we take these cells from the embryo. but now a lot ofpeople are doing it at the blastocyst stage, atabout day five of development. you can take these trifectodom[phonetic] cells which are going to go up and make the placenta. it doesn't actually affect theinner cell mass which will go and make the, the fetus, butyou can take these and find out about the genesof the embryo.

so this is a, a short videoshowing you embryo biopsy, and the first stagethere was making a hole in the zonapalusida [inaudible]. so here's the [inaudible],you can just about see that around the outside, andwe need to make this hole so that we can gain access, andthis prepack here is just going to gently aspirate one ofthese cells from the embryo. a trifectodom biopsyis very similar. we're just going to take

from the trifectodomcells from the embryo. so once we've got our singlecell, then we can apply the, the diagnosis to that. [ background noise ] >> dr. harper: so for pgd,we use the same techniques that are used ingenetic testing. we can use pcr to look atmutations in specific genes. we can use fish to look atchromosomes, and we can also, more recently, areusing these arrays.

this array comparativegenetic [inaudible] and these single nucleartype polymorphism arrays, and i haven't got time,unfortunately, to tell you more about them, but if you visitthis paper that i wrote with gary hartan last year,we've written a review on the current useof arrays in pgd. so this is some ofthe data from eshra. in eshra, we collect data everyyear, and we publish this data, and you can find these, thesepapers are in open access,

and you can get these onthe eshra [inaudible], the eshra website,the pgd consortium, but the most common diseasesthat are diagnosed are those that are very serious diseasesand those that are very, very common in, in thegeneral population. something i'm going to bringin, in is testing for things that are not so importantand not so life threatening. in the u.k., we are very lucky. we are governed by thehuman fertilization em,

embryology authority. hopefully still inthe future, their, their future is a littlebit bleak at the moment because they're mergingwith another big group, but at the moment, the hfearegulates all the diagnoses that we do. so to do a geneticdiagnosis, we have to, by pgd, we have to have permissionfrom the hfea, and if you're interested inwhat is and what is not allowed

at the moment, if yougo to the hfea website, it will list everythingthat they've licensed. all the diseases thatare licensed for by pgd. and there have been somecontroversial ones on there that have been actuallyslightly taken out of content. there was one that said that,that they've licensed a pgd for a squint, and it'snot actually a squint, it's actually a muchmore involved disease, and also diseases do varyin different families.

as i said, genetics is notthat, that easy anymore. it's, things thatget very complicated. and this is, so what we've done in our own center using thisarray cgh, siobhan sanguta is in charge of all ourdiagnoses, and this was one of our ph.d. students,famina mamus, who has taken single cells andapplied these on this array, and from this, wecan look at all of the chromosomesfrom a single cell.

so these are the chromosomeslisted here, 1 to 22 plus x and y, and anythingwithin this line is normal, anything above the line there'san extra copy of the chromosome, and so this one'sactually trisomy 10, there's an extra copy of chromosome 10 inthis single cell. and in this cell here, you mightsee there's several chromosomes below the line andseveral above the line. this is a, a very,very abnormal cell.

now, i just want to brieflymention a slight tangent to pgd, and that's that thistechnology has been used for a slightly different aim. rather than patientswith, inherit, specific inherited disorders,the technology's being used as something that's beingcalled pre-implantation genetic screening, or pgs, and thisis using the techniques that we look at thechromosomes, not specific genes, but just looking at thechromosomes, and using this

in our ivf patients, sothese are infertile patients, to help embryo selection. we certainly know thatas women age, the, the chromosomes are morelikely to be abnormal. there's an increasein down's syndrome, etc. so this technique hasreally been used to try and improve deliveryrates in these couples and help identify abnormalembryos, but, unfortunately, there's no evidenceat the moment to show

that this does improve deliveryrates, and there's been a lot of press about this becausethere's people say, oh, we can get a 70 percentpregnancy rate using this technology, but, unfortunately,there is no data at the moment to show that this proceduredoes help delivery rates. but i wanted to explain that toyou because this is a summary of our data, and we did thelast publication last year. there's another dueout this year. these are the years of our datacollection, and this is pgs.

you see pgs, this genetic,or chromosome analysis for infertile patientsactually counts for more than all the pgd's put together. so we separate thegenetic disease into sexing [inaudible] disease,chromosome abnormalities, and monogeneticalsingle-gene abnormalities, but i want to point outhere now social sexing. and this is a controversialuse, and i'm going to come back to thatin a moment.

so if the issues around pgd havebeen not that we're using it to help couples that are at risk of serious genetic abnormalityhave a, a, a normal child, but that we're designing babies. that we're not designinganything. if we're designing babies,we'd be doing gene therapy and moving the genes aroundand changing everything. we are selecting the embryosthat those, those patients have, and putting back embryos thatare free from a genetic disease.

we are selecting, butwe're not designing. but this headline hereis "babies created to save their brother." and the, probably the mostfamous case of this is, there's a famousbasketball player called, called carlos boozer, and he hada child here that was affected by sickle cell disease,and this is a very, very serious disease of, ofthe blood, and the only way that he could cure this childwas by having some stem cells

or some cord bloodfrom a matched donor, and the best matcheddonor is a sibling. so what they did is they wentthrough pgd, and this was with mark hughes in theu.s.a. they went through pgd. they made sure that the embryosthat they were going to pick for transfer did nothave sickle cell disease. so that was number one. they did pgd for sickle celldisease, but they also made sure that they had embryosthat were tissue matched

for the already existing child,and they were very lucky. they these twins,twins delivered. they took the cord bloodafter delivery of these twins, and they used the cord bloodcells to cure sickle cell in this child, and as aresult, carlos has donated a lot of money to help pgd,especially in africa for couples that are having sicklecell disease. now, i just wanted to show you. some of you may have read thebook "my sister's keeper,"

or you might haveseen this movie, and this is exactlythe same situation. this is a, a family that aregoing [music] through pgd - >> most babies are accidents. >> oh, how did you know that? >> not me. [background noise]i was engineered. born to save my sister's life. >> dr. harper: oops.

sorry. so that child, asthey sit there, she was born to save her sister's life,and the child actually in the movie that's alreadyexisting has actually leukemia, and they went throughpgd in this story to use the cord blood,but then that didn't work, and the book's verydifferent to the film. i won't say anymore,but i just want to show you how hollywoodshows this. so going back to sex selection,some couples feel that, well,

certainly in the westernworld, i think, i think we look at everything as a commodity,and people really want to have a boy and a girl. that seems to bethe perfect family. i have three boys, and ican't imagine having a girl in my family [laughs], andpeople keep saying to me, are you going to try for a girl? no, i'm not goingto try for a girl. but this is how so many think.

perfect family, aboy and a girl. oh, they're so lucky. they've got a boy and a girl,and it's supposedly banned in all european countries,but certainly if you do this, and you [inaudible] pgs itdoes also determine the sex, and i know many patientsthat have actually come to us and said that they've hadsex selection in a number of european countries. so it's much morewidespread than reported,

and it certainly islegal in some countries. it's legal in australia,and it's legal in the u.s., and it's being done alot in the middle east, for example, in jordan. they have a veryactive pgd program, and they're mainlyselecting boys. it's something like 98 percenti've been told were selecting boys, and this is the trouble. in the developing world,many cultures do want boys.

i've been told by a numberof indian obstetricians that in the labor wards in,in india, if it's a boy, everyone's dancingin the corridor. if it's a girl, everyone'svery quiet. and i've been toldthat a number of times, and i think people shouldhad a read of this book "the first centuryafter beatrice." excellent book where apill's developed where, when the woman takes thispill she only has boys,

and the problem, theinternational problem that develops in this isfrom the developing world. there can be no, not enoughwomen to support the population. robert winston once said on tv his sperm can fertilizethe whole of the u.k., which i, did make me slightly worried. [laughter] but he's right. he is right. if, if, in a population,to sustain the population,

you only need a couple of men. they produce millions of sperm. it takes nine months fora woman to have a child, and just briefly would liketo show you this video, [crosstalk] would youtrust these guys - >> i'm daddy clay - >> and i'm daddy brand. whether or not they'rewilling to admit it, many of the expected parentsout there, for whatever reason,

have a preference- boy or girl - >> and there are a lotof wives' tales out there about what you can doto make a boy or a girl. >> dr. harper: i, i findthat a bit worrying. i found that very easily onthe internet, and i'd just like to take that alittle bit further. someone said i shouldn't showthis because i might get sued. but if we look at victoriabeckham, there was a number of articles aboutwhat she should do

to have a girl or a boy. she made it very clearthat she wanted a girl. they, as she didn't mention pgd, they said she should eat morecheese, delay motherhood, get stressed at work, or lookat the time to conception. they didn't mentionpgd, and then, of course, she's got three boys. i don't know whyshe wants to go, i've heard she wanted a girl.

[inaudible] [laughs] ithink she, she wanted a girl for various reasons, but this,obviously, then confirmed that she was carrying a babygirl, and they were living in the u.s. at the time. so i don't know whetherthey did go through pgd. i always felt like [inaudible]well, if you really want one, you should go through pgd. so there's a numberof ethical concerns. it's to save the siblings, thetissue matching i mentioned,

sex selection, but the issue around pgd has always beenthe non-life threatening, who decides, and these[inaudible] arrays, this is going to be a problembecause this will be a situation where we can testfor almost anything. and this is an article thatcame out i think in january where pre-conception testsallowed prospective parents to screen for flawed dna, couldeliminate childhood diseases, and it says here,"will be available

in british fertilityclinics within months." well, i don't know,i don't know exactly. we didn't really saywhat was going on there, but it's not available yet. so is this designer babyno longer fashionable? well, let's look atsome food for thought. we've got frozen eggs here, fre, freezing of human eggs nowis, is very successful. the, i think i believe inthe u.s., they're going

around campuses and telling allthe girls to freeze their eggs so they can delay motherhood. we've, we will, i'msure, have super eggs. for, for many years, we'vebeen able to go to a sperm bank in the u.s.a. and buy nobelprize winners' sperm [laughter] if you want to do that. we've got dolly the sheep here. i'm going to [inaudible], just very briefly mentionstem cells as i finish off.

another book to revisit,"brave new world." are we that far away,and i'm going to finish off showing youa clip from "gattaca," but let's look nowat the celebrities. so here you've got elton john. they were refused adoption, butthey could use the technologies that we're looking at. so here's some famouscouples that have adopted. they're accessory, their child[inaudible] that they want

from the particularethnic group to, to add to their, their brood. most people wouldn't dothat, but, obviously, that's something they do, andwhere are we going from that. where going from, to eggdonation and also to surrogacy, and you may have beenaware, just read the title. "another day, another47-year-old celebrity pregnant with twins." and this is a website about eggdonation, and it lists a number

of famous people there. ob, obviously, of veryadvanced maternal age. so they probably wouldn't begetting pregnant naturally, and then surrogacy as well. well, elton john would haveto have had an egg donor and someone to carryhis child, but, again, some other famous peoplehave done this recently. we've got here nicole kidman. i don't know why she hadsurrogacy, and there,

there's also a numberof other people. sarah jessica par,parker, etc. and something that brings me onto, anotherbook that we should revisit - margaret atwood "thehandmaid's tale." this was a situationwhere in the, in the not-too-distantfuture something had happened which affected fertility,and the rich people, then, took a young fertilewoman into their home, and she was their egg and,egg donor and their surrogate,

and she carried the child forthe family, and, unfortunately, i think that's already here. so i think there really wasn'tthe not-too-distant future. so stem cells. there are two typesof stem cells. there's embryonic stemcells which we have to get from the inner cellmass of the embryo. there's induced pluriopotentstem cells which we can get from an, an already existingadult, and the view is

that we can use these stem cells to make all the tissuesand repair ourself. so if i need a new hearttissue, i could take some of my skin stem, stem cells, andmake them then different shape, into heart tissue, and thenuse that for my treatment. very expensive if we weretrying to do this on the nhs. i don't know how [inaudible]is going to cope with this, but the embryonic stem cells, the problem hereis tissue matching.

we can't just take stem cells from an embryo anduse that for me. it's not going totissue matched. i would actually reject it. but let's just beforewe go onto cloning look at some more frivoloususe of stem cells. so, anyway, there's always,there's always one, isn't there? [laughter] so let's,let's look at cloning. now, cloning [inaudible]falls into two parts -

therapeutic and reproductive. basically, they'rethe same things. we take some of my skin,we take an egg, and this, this is one of the ratelimiting steps here. we need to get eggs from people. we take out the nucleusfrom the egg, and we put one of my skin cell nucleiin there, and we zap it, and hopefully we'dmake a blastocyst. if we're going to want someheart, cardiac tissue for me,

we can take thatblastocyst, make stem cells, and then make my cardiac tissue, and help my conditionthat i've got. so that's what therapeuticcloning is. again, not sure the nhswould do this for everyone that needed some new hearttissue, and at the moment, as far as we're aware,we haven't got to this stage in the human. if we decide to takethis blastocyst,

instead of making stem cells,we put that back in someone, maybe even myself, thenthat's reproductive cloning. there's a number of peoplethat have claimed to do this. that's certainly howdolly the sheep happened. this blastocyst here with ourown cells in was transferred, and, and she was delivered, and it's been donein numerous species. it is only a matter of time. mary warnock came toucl a few years ago,

and she said this will not bedone in our lifetime, and i, i personally don't agree. i think this definitely will. they'll be some crazy person whowill do this in our lifetime, and i'll show you, again, hollywood's interpretationof this. [background noise] >> you're clones. you're copies of peopleout here in the world.

>> what? >> clones. >> copies of, what areyou talking about - >> why? >> some hag trophy wife needsnew skin for a facelift, or one of them gets sick, andthey need a new part, they, they take it from you. >> dr. harper: youneed to see the film. [laughter] i'll stop there.

so, where are we goingto be in the future? now, i think, there'stwo companies that say they'll sequenceyour genetic code. they've got a lotof press about this. i know some people at tuftsmedical college in boston, and the dean of themedical school decided that all the staff runtheir blood through this, which was not a good idea. they found some thingsthey didn't want to find,

some late onset issueswithin some of their staff. and all you have to dofor $199, it was at $499, [laughter] you get your kit,you, you give them some saliva, and then they sendyou this information. there's a couple of points,just want to point out here. learn from your dna. you'll find out about baldness,your muscle performance, and your risk for 99 diseases. now, i apologize to all of thosein the audience with red hair,

but i just thoughtthat this was something that we should have a look at. you can also checkyour susceptibility to transmitting hair color,and, of course, they're looking at red versus non-red hair. so i apologize for that, buthave a look at that website. that's, again, food for thought. there is just, it's just scary, it's very scary, butthat can be done.

and the final videoi want to show you, [background noise] well,this is very loud so i - >> [inaudible] what canit [inaudible] the ability to perfect the physicaland mental characteristics of every unborn child? [ crosstalk ] >> in the not-too-distantfuture, our dna will determineeverything about us. [ music ]

>> a minute drop of blood >> saliva, or a single hairdetermines where you can work, who you should marry, whatyou're capable of achieving. >> dr. harper: so,certainly, the technology to do that is actually almost here. hopefully, we won't allreproduce, be reproducing by pgd and selecting the most fitembryos, but certainly, the technology ishere to do that. so i'd just like to thank you.

this is our team, some past andpresent members of our team. my son was convincedthis morning that this was a picture of him. i said, "sorry, it'snot a picture of him." but, which baby wouldyou choose? [inaudible] thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you for a wide rangingand fascinating [inaudible]. we've got about threeminutes for questions.

we, we need three days, i think. [laughter] >> dr. harper: i willbe outside as well if anyone has anyother questions. [background talk] louis. louis. >> louis: [inaudible]you haven't spoken about genetic manipulation - >> dr. harper: no.

[laughter] no. that's another lecture,louis, that's another lecture. as i was saying,that's not what, that's what we're not doing - >> louis: ok. >> dr. harper: hopefullynot yet. >> anybody else with a question? >> dr. harper: there'ssomeone at the back. >> as of a couple ofyears ago, it's illegal

to prefer an embryolikely to develop a, a disease over one that isn't. that's very easy when youonly know about one disease at a time through pgd. bit more difficult when theembryo that's most genetically healthy and the one that's moremorphologically healthy are different, how'sit going to work or what are the consequences if we're doing [inaudible]embryo testing,

and you know multiple thingsabout several embryos, and you can't pick one that'sless healthy than the other? >> dr. harper: it's,it's a mindfield. it's a total, total mindfield. these [inaudible] arrays aregoing to tell us so much. i mean, even in prenataldiagnosis now when they've got a, anamniocentesis or a cvs, and they, they're usingthese [inaudible], they don't know howto, we don't know how

to interpret theinformation we've got now. there's so much information. sometimes the fetus looks like it's got a reallyserious abnormality. we test the parents and find outthat they've got the same thing. we just don't know enough aboutthe genetic code at the moment. so it will take several years to really understand theinformation that we get, but when we do understandit, how we choose one

over the other is goingto be very [inaudible]. that's why i'm glad at themoment we've got the hfea. so i don't want them to go away because i don't knowwhat we're going to do. it's, it's, it's goingto be a mindfield. there's no answer to that. it's going to be tricky. there was one question here. [background talk] alright.

yes. yes. so we're luckywe've got the hfea. [laughs] they're our buffer. you know, in, in othercountries, they don't have that, and the, it's, it'sgoing to be complicated. >> well, the, the,the admiration of the world actually is - >> dr. harper: [crosstalk] yeah. no, they are, they are - >> it's absurd that anyonewould want to abolish it.

>> dr. harper: yes. >> anybody got anyother questions? [background talk] >> dr. harper: hopefullythere's some food for thought [inaudible]. [laughs] i guess some booksand websites will [inaudible] - >> on everyone's behalf,then, let me thank dr. harper for giving us a verystimulating lecture.