WE'RE troubled by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's decision not grant a licence allowing doctors to create a "designer baby" to help save a couple's sick son.

Michelle and Jayson Whitaker want to use a "tissue-typing" IVF technique to provide a perfect tissue match for three-year-old Charlie and allow him a potentially life-saving bone marrow transplant.

His mum denies "playing God", but the HFEA says approving the procedure would be unlawful and unethical.

And it insists Charlie's case is different from another you might recall, that of Zain Hashmi, whose parents were allowed to screen a baby son because his rare blood condition was hereditary.

"They understand it's not a designer baby, or a designer baby issue, but they just don't understand about the disorder," Mrs Whitaker says. It's hard not to agree.

From the patient's point of view - as Lib-Dem health spokesman Dr Evan Harris says - it's difficult to justify a distinction between the two equally sick boys simply because Charlie's condition isn't hereditary.

We don't believe Parliament had children like him in mind, or such circumstances, when the law was passed in 1990.

Carefully-crafted the legislation might have been, but medical science has moved on massively since - and it needs to be looked at again.

That might be too late for Charlie, a tragedy in itself. But the anomaly needs to be acknowledged and corrected as surely as if it were a disorder itself before some other family finds itself in the Whitakers' position.