ABSTRACT
Human procreation has become the subject of powerful medical interventions, the two most prominent being assisted reproduction and prenatal diagnosis. Preimplantation diagnosis (PID) may be regarded as the culmination of this development. In order to recognise or exclude genetic disorders it combines in vitro fertilisation with the molecular or cytogenetic analysis of a sample from the very early conceptus. The therapeutic power of in vitro fertilisation has been vastly enhanced by micromanipulative technology that allows the handling of gametes and embryos with great precision. The most important of these techniques is intracytoplasmic sperm injection, now the standard procedure for the symptomatic treatment of severe male factor infertility. It turned out that, with the current technical state of PID, for none of the 329 couples would there have been an unequivocal medical indication to use this technique.
