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The university's cutting-edge combination of advanced computer analysis, genetic screening, and gene therapy had caused a stir in 1998, both as a scientific breakthrough and as a controversial moneymaking enterprise for the university (see ' Buying the Future: Perfect Kids for Cold Cash,' Wired 6.06, page 450).Ĭombining proprietary chemical and genetic tests for diseases and congenital abnormalities, all collated by the new 'expert system' software developed at Carnegie Mellon University, the institute had developed a system that, according to its own publicity materials, 'virtually guarantees not only a successful labor and delivery, but the healthy child every family dreams about.' _ Her 'conception' began more than _ two years ago in the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit at the Institute for Human Gene Therapy. 'If we win the Nobel Prize, I wonder if they'll let me keep mine in my cell?'Īll this week, while the members of the Pennsylvania cloning team pondered their collective futures, Katy Hytner, an outwardly ordinary 2-year-old who had only last week been playing with Legos and Sesame Street dolls at the Oceanview Children's Center in Pacifica, was not yet aware of the controversy surrounding her birth. We were applying established scientific knowledge to a specific problem.

'We weren't conducting research for the sake of research. At her home in suburban Philadelphia, Koteas looks out the window. 'And some of those funds were tied to government grants.' The use of such funding, she acknowledges, defied the moratorium on human-cloning research encouraged by then-President Clinton in 1997. 'We did the work using university facilities, so yes, technically, university funds were used for the work,' admits Koteas.

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