Germline TherapyWhen I was a student in elementary school I was first told about genetics. I was told that traits are passed from parents to offspring and that each parent contributes equally. One day, I'm told, parents will be able to go to the drug store on the corner and choose what kind of child they want. They might choose things like blue eyes, high intelligence, and even the sex of their baby. The moment I was told this, I believed I would see this in my lifetime. I expected that when I had children I would be able to grasp their traits. I was especially excited to think that my children would not inherit my genetic disorder. I wasn't entirely sure how this would all work, but I was curious to find out. As I progressed in my high school career, I learned more about genetics. I ultimately decided that genetics was the field of study I wanted to pursue in college. Once in college I learned that determining your child's traits wasn't as easy as going to the corner drug store and picking up a pill, as I had imagined when I was a child. In fact, it would probably not be possible to determine most traits, such as eye and hair color, even in the foreseeable future. What that entailed I couldn't even understand when I was a freshman in college. The more I understood about molecular biology, the less feasible determining traits seemed. Then came Dolly, the cloned sheep. Scientists have been pursuing the idea of ​​germline therapy for some time. Germline therapy essentially consists of alterations made to germ cells. Germ cells are eggs, sperm, and early embryos (Henzig 1998). Any manipulation of the germline would be passed on to future generations. Any corrections made at this stage will not need to be made again to that person's descendants. Traditional gene therapy on adults is called somatic cell therapy. This type of gene therapy must be repeated for each affected person in subsequent generations (Svitil 1998). Dolly was an important discovery because she was the first animal to be created from a differentiated adult cell. This cloning technique has made germline research much easier. Adult cells are more abundant than embryonic cells and there should be no objection to research on differentiated cells from an adult donor.