Sex-selection of calves raises fears

THE SUCCESS of a new insemination technique in choosing the sex of cattle and horses has provoked an ethical debate after suggestions that it might be used on humans.

While one ethicist said the issue raised serious questions of political control, a leading advocate of sex selection said yesterday that he thought such practices would eventually become accepted in medicine.

Dr Paul Rainsbury, of the Roding Hospital in Ilford, Essex, said: "At the end of the day it's not the authorities, or scientists or doctors who determine what gets done, it's the public. What was unacceptable 10 years ago, such as surrogacy, is now accepted practice. I would hope that in five or 10 years' time attitudes will have changed and this will be allowed."

The debate was sparked off when it emerged yesterday that the first calves in Europe whose sex was selected before conception were born last month on a farm belonging to Cogent, a Chester-based company. Charity, Clover and Chloe were produced by separating bull sperm with the female X chromosome from sperm with the male Y chromosome. Only X-bearing sperm were used for insemination.

The technique is potentially worth millions of pounds to cattle, horse and pig breeders: cattle farmers want female calves for milk; male foals make better showjumpers but females better polo ponies; and sows are preferred on pig farms. Presently, many of the 600,000 bull calves born in Britain each year are slaughtered when they are a few days old.

The same technique could also be applied to in-vitro fertilisation in humans because it relies on a characteristic common to all mammalian sperm.

Dr Mervin Jacobson, president of the American firm XY Inc, of Fort Collins, which is marketing the breeding method, said: "Scientifically it's correct that humans are also mammals and therefore our system would work on humans. But our own company is only licensed for non-human mammals." The technology, developed in 1989, is patented in the US by the Department of Agriculture.

But according to a leading animal ethics and welfare expert there are worrying implications. The Rev Professor Andrew Linzey, a fellow of Oxford University, said: "We have to ask whether this is the street we want to walk down. It's not just a question of whether we can control the gender of the sex of our children, but a question of who is going to control it. There is a political question at the heart of this, who is going to control this power."

Choosing the sex of children is illegal under the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. But Dr Rainsbury has helped some couples exploit a loophole by sending their sperm to a US company which sorts it for in-vitro fertilisation.

The system used to pick the sex of animals relies on the fact that the X chromosome is longer than the Y chromosome.Last August XY claimed its first success when a female foal was born in Colorado. The technique could be worth $600m (pounds 375m) annually in the US horse market.