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Designer Babies Genetics

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Until a few years ago having a baby boy or a baby girl was just complete chance. Not anymore. Now parents have the option to decide on the gender of their future baby, along with many other genetic traits, such as eye colour, hair colour, intelligence, athletic ability and even skin tone. Designer babies can also be made for medical reasons, by changing the genetics of a baby, diseases such as down syndrome and turner syndrome can be prevented. A designer baby can also be made with identical tissue to be donated to a sick sibling in need.

Before researchers were able to find a way to make this possible, they first had to understand more about genetics. Genetics explains the process of parents passing down genes to their children, these genes are things like hair colour, eye colour and genetic disorders. Every human has 23 pairs of chromosomes, 43 individual, and within them is where the genes are carried, each chromosome holds about 20,000 genes.

A chromosome is made up of genes, which is sort sections of DNA (Deoxynucleic acid) . Within the genes, there are alleles, which are different forms of a gene. For example the gene for eye colour has an allele for blue eyes and an allele for green eyes. Alleles can be either dominant or recessive. The characteristic controlled by a dominant allele develops if the allele exists …show more content…

Mitosis produces two cells, identical to each other and the parent cell. This means that each chromosome is copied exactly. During the mitosis cell cycle there are 6 stages, Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase and Cytokinesis. Sometimes the cell divide uncontrollably. This results in a large mass of cells called a tumor. If tumor successfully gets into other body tissue the result is

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