They decided to screen her embryos and remove the inherited cancer-causing gene BRCA-1 because the baby's father, his sister, mother, grandmother and cousin all had the cancer.

The expectant parents are a 27-year-old London woman and her 28-year-old husband. The woman is now 14 weeks pregnant after undergoing IVF treatment. Of the 11 embryos produced, five did not have the gene and two were implanted.

Laurence Shaw, deputy medical director of the Bridge Fertility Centre in London, described the technique as "an exciting development".

He said: "It opens the door to a lot of questions about screening of diseases that might happen in the future.

"However we should be aware that this does not mean that the baby born will be immune from breast cancer - it means that the baby with that gene has a decreased likelihood of having that cancer."

About 5% of the 44,000 cases of breast cancer diagnosed in Britain each year are estimated to be caused by the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes, both of which can be detected in embryos.

Doctors argue that thousands of cases of breast cancer could be avoided by screening embryos using the technique called preimplantation diagnosis (PGD).

Any daughter born with the gene would have had a 50% to 85% chance of developing breast cancer.

The unnamed mother-to-be told the Sunday Times: "For the past three generations, every single woman in my husband's family has had breast cancer, as early as 27 and 29 ... It has been successful for us which means we are eliminating the gene from our line."