The Founding Papers · FP·11 · 1990
1990: Testing an embryo to protect a family
Alan Handyside and his colleagues took a single cell from early embryos to help two families avoid a serious inherited disease.
The story
Some conditions pass from mother to son through the X chromosome. For families carrying them, Handyside, Kontogianni, Hardy and Winston offered something new. They removed one cell from each embryo at the six- to eight-cell stage and tested it to find the embryo's sex.
Only female embryos, which would not be affected, were transferred. Both women became pregnant with twins. This was the beginning of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, now used around the world.
“Both women are confirmed as carrying normal female twins.”From the paper's abstract
The paper
Pregnancies from Biopsied Human Preimplantation Embryos Sexed by Y-Specific DNA Amplification
A. H. Handyside, E. H. Kontogianni, K. Hardy, R. M. Winston
Nature 1990;344(6268):768 to 770. Published 19 April 1990. Read the paper.
How we know
Abstract read in PubMed and Europe PMC, 6 October 2026.
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