Families embrace hope of high-tech cancer screening

Having cancer can be terrifying. What may be more terrifying is seeing a specific kind of cancer passing down to you from your family tree, and knowing helplessly that it will haunt your children and grandchildren.

Luckily for Wang Wei (who asked China Daily to use her pseudonym for privacy concerns), a 38-year-old new mother who has hereditary multiple exostoses, rare bone growth that can become cancerous in childhood, the family nightmare may finally end.

So may it be for many parents like her in China, as a leading reproductive hospital has successfully produced two cancer-free babies, including one for Wang, using a pre-screening technology called the pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). The treatment, as an additional procedure to the normal in-vitro fertilization (IVF), essentially selects the embryo that bears no hereditary cancer genes before putting it into a mother's womb.