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- Hello, good afternoon.
- Good afternoon.
- To the Medical College, please.
- The Medical College?
- Yes.
- Yes, I’m going there to give a conference,
basically about IVF and regenerative medicine.
I work at the Centre of Regenerative Medicine as well from Barcelona.
- This thing IVF thing, is it true what they say,
that soon people will be able to choose a kid with blue eyes?
Or is that an urban myth?
- No, that’s not what we aim to do...
What we want to do is help couples who can’t have children to have them.
It’s got nothing to do with choosing children
who are smarter or blonder or anything like that.
That’s not the purpose - and what’s more it can’t be done.
- What do you think about the controversy
regarding cloning and the genetic manipulation of embryos?
Reproductive cloning is
a very risky technique at the moment if what you want to do is use it on humans.
Apart from the fact it is very risky and gives rise to many problems,
and in fact nobody has managed to clone the human species yet
it is a technique that couldn’t be used to make copies of someone.
That’s just a myth. In other words, we are not just
the genes we carry but also the way our environment modulates them.
If we’re talking about therapeutic cloning, that is something else altogether.
That is cloning used to make specific stem cells
of particular people and there are a number of therapeutic applications,
particularly when it comes to expanding knowledge, which will be very useful.
That is something definitely worth talking about.
Barcelona is in a very privileged position at the moment,
like other cities, and in fact biomedicine and regenerative medicine are now starting up
in a number of places around the country. We are lucky that our laws
allow us to do research on embryos, and the fact that we can,
enables us to get embryonic stem cells. The centre in Barcelona,
along with the ones in Valencia and Granada, is doing research
in this field that I believe will give good results,
hopefully in the very near future.