Barcoding embryos

March 10th, 2014
What message is being sent when you begin life as a number?
As a child in a small American town I used to visit a tobacco shop to buy my sweets. It was hot one summer’s day and the quiet man behind the counter with a thick Polish accent had rolled up his sleeves. I remember seeing a number tattooed on his inner forearm. Tattoos weren’t fashionable then and the only ones I had seen were the anchors on the bulging forearms of Popeye.

A six-digit number was an odd choice for a tattoo, but I didn’t ask him about it. I was more interested in my sweets.

Perhaps I should have. Perhaps I would have learned a few things about how people can treated like boxes in a warehouse. All these years later, that man’s tattoo spells out the theory and practice of dehumanisation for me better than any textbook.

Like branding in the ancient world, those blurry blue digits symbolised a person’s entrance into a world where he or she was just a commodity. And not a valuable commodity, but one which could be disposed of at will, so long as it could be accounted for.

Which is why I was revolted by an article in the January issue of the journal Human Reproduction.

Researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain have come up with an “exciting” and “novel” system for tracking embryos and eggs in IVF clinics: barcodes, essentially microscopic tattoos. They have successfully attached several biofunctionalized polysilicon barcodes to the outer surface of the egg. The labels are injected into a space between the cell wall and the zona pellucida, a membrane that surrounds an egg. During normal reproduction, a fertilised embryo will shed this outer layer along with the barcodes.

Here is their enthusiastic description of the process:

Keep reading.

Categories: Artificial Reproductive Technology Tags: , ,
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