UK experts revealed an improved method which could allow hundreds of couples to avoid the risk of having children with a killer disease. It will be quicker and more accurate than existing screening. More disturbingly, a London hospital applied to use IVF sex selection techniques to help couples with a family history of autism – by destroying all their male embryos. There is no reliable genetic test for autism, but boys are more likely than girls to have the condition. Implanting only females would dramatically reduce the risk, but mean many perfectly healthy male embryos would be discarded. Ethical campaigners said the move was yet another example of how the goalposts were being moved ever wider. Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: ‘It is not about taking an embryo and curing it, but about diagnosing and then throwing away.’ Simone Aspis, of the British Council of Disabled People, warned: ‘Screening out autism would breed a fear that anyone who is different in any way will not be accepted. It would create a society where only perfection is valued.’ Scientists at University College Hospital in London have applied to the watchdog Human Fertilisation […]