What if you could read much of your child's medical future while it was still in the womb? Taking a major step toward that goal, one fraught with therapeutic potential and ethical questions, scientists have now accurately predicted almost the whole genome of an unborn child by sequencing DNA from the mother's blood and DNA from the father's saliva. At the moment, prenatal diagnosis for a small number of genetic conditions is usually done from fetal cells that doctors capture from fluid in the womb (amniocentesis) or a snippet of placental tissue (chorionic villus sampling). But these methods, which require the insertion of a needle or tube into the womb or placenta, can cause miscarriages in about 1% of all cases...read more>>>...
