A woman has given birth to what her doctor calls central New York’s first genetically selected baby after her fertilized eggs were screened in a lab for a hereditary disease. The healthy baby girl, Taylor Michaels, was born in early June after embryos created in a lab from the mother’s eggs and father’s sperm were tested for cystic fibrosis a deadly genetic disease that causes respiratory infections, breathing difficulty and permanent lung damage. Dr. Robert Kiltz, director of the CNY Fertility Center in Syracuse, said they used pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, to screen the embryos, a procedure that has been available for about five years at fertility clinics in big U.S. cities.
