ABSTRACT
The advent of medically assisted reproduction has had many consequences barely anticipated at the time of the Warnock report and not provided for in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Cell nucleus replacement is one such example and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and tissue typing (HLA) is another. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has allowed PGD to be employed to produce a child who would be a good tissue match for a sibling who needed a bone marrow transplant. PGD and HLA had been used for this purpose in Colorado in the USA in the Nash case, and a British couple had taken advantage of the facility there to do the same thing, before HFEA gave the go-ahead to the Hashmis in Leeds. However, the use of PGD to create 'saviour siblings' is new — the technology of PGD itself is relatively so — and more research is needed before we can rule out any long-term effects.
