Unnatural Selection: Should California Regulate Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD)?

Stanford Law School presents: Pushing genetic boundaries, how far should scientists and parents go?

Banned in Britain. A UK couple who wanted to genetically select an embryo to produce a matching bone marrow baby for their existing child, fled to the U.S. where the procedure is legal.

Controversy in America. The Bush Administration is about to release a bioethics report that decries new human reproductive technologies that would genetically improve children, and calls for a federal ban on certain procedures.

Experts say it is only a matter of time before the technology advances past sex selection, and we are able to engineer the selection of cosmetic traits like height, eye color, or even the genetic contributions to sexual orientation or basic temperament.

Come to Stanford Law School to hear from world experts on the science of this reproductive technology, the ethical controversy over PGD, and the legal, political, and medical realities of any effort by the state of California to regulate it.

PGD is an extension of in vitro fertilization where doctors pluck a single cell from newly formed embryos and test for genetic diseases and sex before an embryo is selected and implanted in a woman to produce a child.

These test results offer new choices for prospective parents, but raise new issues for society. Over the last decade, more than 1,000 children worldwide have been born as a result of PGD. Although heavily regulated in some countries, PGD is largely unregulated in the United States.

The Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology and the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences will hold a one-day conference on this controversial topic to explore, at a practical level, whether and how PGD should be regulated in California. The Conference marks the launch of the new Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences.

Cosponsored by Affymetrix, Paul Hastings, and Stanford University Bio-X Program

Featured speakers include:

Rebecca Dresser

-Member, President's Council on Bioethics (Current Bush Administration)

-Professor of Law and Professor of Ethics in Medicine, Washington University

R. Alta Charo

-Member, National Bioethics Advisory Commission, 1996-2001 (Clinton Administration)

-Professor of Law and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Schools of Law and Medicine

-Described by the Washington Post as one of the most plugged in science policy players outside the Beltway.

John Robertson

-Chair, Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine

-Author, Children of Choice: Freedom and the New Reproductive Technologies

-Professor of Law, Chair of Law, University of Texas School of Law

Henry T. Greely

-Member, California Advisory Committee on Human Cloning

-Director, Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences

-C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law, and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics, Stanford University