A British woman conceived the country's first "designer baby" guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer.

Only one other woman from Israel is believed to have become pregnant after undergoing the same screening technique, called pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD).  

The 27-year-old London woman is 14 weeks pregnant with her first child. She was implanted with two of the cleared embryos. She opted to have her embryos screened because her husband had tested positive for the gene and his grandmother, mother, sister and cousin all battled breast cancer.  

The woman and her husband went through IVF to create 11 embryos for doctors to screen using a controversial technique call pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD). The embryos were tested for the cancer gene by removing one cell when they were three days old. Six tested positive and were rejected. From the remaining five doctors chose two to implant. Others have been frozen for future use.

Doctors claim that a female child conceived through this way, from an embryo with the hereditary gene, called BRCA-1, has 50 to 85 per cent chance of developing breast cancer.

More then 2,000 breast cancer cases a year are caused by either the BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 genes, both of which can be identified in embryos.  
 
Doctors say this could be avoided by screening. But it is considered as unethical because it results in the destruction of viable embryos. There are also fears it could lead to the creation of "designer babies" that are chosen for their looks or intelligence.  

However, the couple’s doctor Paul Serhal, medical director of the Assisted Conception Unit at University College Hospital, London, said: “Women now have the option of having this treatment to avoid the potentially guilty feeling of passing on this genetic abnormality to a child. This gives us the chance to eradicate this problem in families.”  

He has treated couples trying to conceive babies without other cancer-causing genes.