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Genetically Modified Humans Born
sh64109 writes: "According to this article that just popped up on the BBC, some children were born recently with modified genes. The modification was made to mitochondrial (not nuclear) DNA so only the girls (if there were any) will be able to pass this on. The purpose of the mod was to correct an infertility problem."
"Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year-old children confirm that they contain a small quantity of additional genes not inherited from either parent."
The truth (tm):
Baby is genetically tested. Genes exist that don't match either parent. Wife, afraid of admitting that she was fucking the plumber, tries to explain it "Our child was genetically manipulated by them scientists."
...to CORRECT an infertility problem. On an overpopulated planet. Great.
Did it ever occur to anyone that perhaps there's a REASON some people are infertile?
I might sound overly harsh, but if this continues, we'll have lots and lots of perfectly healthy, long-lived, incredibly weak and fragile human beings walking this planet.
Let the flames begin.
El riesgo vive siempre!
So I guess this means that gene splicing, etc was NOT involved. And what they did was to add mitochonria from one person into the cells of another.
Sort of similar to replacing whole chromosomes, though that could be the next step.
Sort of like hacking code by replacing whole sections of code. This should be safe, as far as the children goes.
But the can of worms it opens...
I do not mind it by itself, it is just that I do not know of any agency that I would feel comfortable in trusting with this sort of thing.
That, ultimately, is the problem. Who do you trust?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I wonder how long until all the quake mod geeks become human mod geeks.
"Our new auto-aim mod for the standard U.S. soldier causes instant and accurate targeting of the enemy ..."
The modification was made to mitochondrial (not nuclear) DNA so only the girls (if there were any) will be able to pass this on.
This is incorrect. Recent (5-10 years ago) it has been shown that mitochondria do migrate from father to child.
How? A sperm cell is basically a protein capsule with DNA in it, and a tail on the back end. However, around this tail there's an enormeous amount of mitochondria present, which create energy for the tail to function.
When an eg is fertilised, the sperm cell head fuses with the egg cell. In a number of occasions this fusion also includes part of the tail, and with the tail these mitochondria.
Even if the amount of mitochondria present is very small compared to those provided by the mother, they can get the upperhand if they are 'fitter' (e.g. multiply faster)
Therefore, genetically modified boys (because the mother can get a boy) can pass on the modified genes. Although in this case no genes were modified, but just recombined.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
It looks to me like the people quoted in this article were trying to score points with the Catholic church; maybe the authors were too.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Hmm... Nope. I don't see it in the old testament anywhere. There's no evidence that it's unethical. Even despite the fact that these kiddos now have a better (Unfair) chance of having their own kiddos one day, I don't see how it is in any way unethical.
Now 'Stupid' is another matter altogether. Think about it for a second. Haven't the vast majority of gene scientists come forth to agree with the fact that the complexity of the human genome lies not in the number of genes that exist, but in the way they interact?
Who's to say that having an extra set of Mitochondrial DNA won't snafu those interactions somehow? Yeah, it's nice to think "Hey, that's where the problem is, so why don't we replace those parts", but where the hell is the animal testing to see what happens when baby mice and rhesus monkeys have too many Mitochondria? I see no references to the research in the (very sensational) BBC article.
Also, there's the fact of 'Natural Selection' to consider. Something is wrong with those genes if they're not being passed on. Now these kids have a set of 'bad' Mitochondrial DNA along with their 'good' M-DNA. That gets passed on to their kids, and so on. What other problems are lurking in that 'bad' DNA along with infertility? A tendancy toward cancer? Schizophrenic or psychotic behavior? Yeah, it's harsh to say that you can't reproduce because you got damaged genes, but hey, You're genes are damaged! Are you really sure you want to give those to your kids anyway?
There are a *lot* of really good options for people who want kids but can't have them. It is more difficult to adopt than it is to just have a child, but there are millions of homeless children all around the world.
Rather than making it easier for people with bad genes to have children, why don't we concentrate on streamlining the adoption process and make it easier for people to adopt children from underprivaleged nations around the world? Let's have social justice before we start muckign around in the old gene-code there, pals.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This has nothing to do with human DNA as in the genome, the double helix we all think of. This is our main source of genetic information and defines the majority of our genetic characteristics.
Mitochondria are organelles (subcellular organisms) which are necessary for our cells to produce energy. Without them we would die. Mitochondria are stand-alone units in our cells. Our cells' DNA cannot produce mitochodria. When we are conceived, there are mitochondria in our mother's egg cell. When the zygote divides, the mitochondria divide too. All the billions of mitochondria in our cells are descended from those which come from our mothers eggs.
Because of the mitochodria's relatively autonomous existence and reproduction, many scientists believe they are actually a seperate life form (something similar to a bacteria, for example) which "moved in" to our cells, creating a symbiotic relationship and resulting in the basis for cellular life on earth.
It appears to me that what these scientists have done is take genetically unaltered, presumably healthy mitochondria out of an individual's cell and implanted them into the egg cell of a mother who's mitochondria are presumably defective. This is not, to my mind, genetic modification, although the resulting children do have some genetic material in their cells that their mothers don't have.
What's causing the ruckus is these are the first children born with modified "germ" cells (i.e. sperm or egg). The changes should change every cell in the body - if succesful they will all contain the healthy donor mitochondria. Ethically I don't see the issue - You can put another person's heart in someone's chest, but not an organelle in an egg? Mitochondria are probably alien to our cells anyway, so to me the ethics of this is a pretty grey area. Anyway, it's a long long way from Gattaca in anything but abstract conception.
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Our agricultural methods have already led to the desertification of the worlds richest lands, namely the fertile crescent that was the birthplace of our civilization. The once fertile Tigris and Euphratis valley is now desert, primarilly because the land was farmed until the soil simply died and was consumed by an ever-growing dustbowl.
Similar agricultural catastrophe is believed to have played a signifigant role in the downfall of the ancient Mayan civilization, and has plagued other agricultural regions as well.
Already in the world's so-called bread-basket (the American mid-west) we have lost well over half of the topsoil that was here just a century ago. Wind and water erosion, coupled with agricultural procedures which are not sustainable, are literally killing the land.
Is there a way to perform agriculture without killing the land? Yes. Is there a way of doing so and feeding even half of the people currently residing on the planet? No, not even if every square inch of arable land were converted, with the sole purpose of creating food for humans (read: no more parks, no more building above ground, no more wildlife refuges, no more wildlife).
Worse, it would do no good. You could use every square inch of the planet to produce food for humans, and have the most effecient distribution system possible, and there would still be widespread starvation. Why? Because populations always grow to meet their supply of food, whether that population consists of rats in a cage or humans in the wild is immaterial. "Meeting the supply of food" in a biological sense doesn't mean everyone is well fed, it means that the poluation is as large as the food supply will permit, which generally means that a significant portion of that population is living on the edge of starvation.
Population pressures aren't just a question of getting what was grown today into someone's mouth, or about elbow room to build a house, it is a question of sustainability. Daniel Quinne has written some excellent works on this very subject (and its ramifications). "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" in particular are quite insighteful and thought provoking.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If I understand the article correctly, DNA is NOT being inserted into mitochondria. The children are not "genetically modified" in the traditional sense. The mitochondria from mother 1 had a defect, so mitochondria from mother 2 was injected into the haploid egg or single cell diploid embryo. The term for this is cybrid (CYtoplasmic hyBRID). This is a technique that's been used before when working with cell lines that have had their mitochondria killed off through exposure to ethedium bromide for ~3 months (rho0 cells). You kill off the mito, then repopulate the cell with mitochondria you want. In this case, it sounds like the children have a mixed population of mitochondria. This would mean that females could still pass the defect to their offspring.
Tell me, forkboy, by what mechanism does overpopulation - in itself - produce infertility?
...
How exactly does "natural selection" say we are breeding too much?
Just curious
"Well it's not Victory - but then it's not Death either."
because mitochondrial dna is only passed from mother to offspring, in the late eighties some scientists were able to reconstruct a "mitochondrial eve."
;-)
i'm not talking about one original human mother, i'm talking about a mitochondrial genome that existed eons ago that we all share as our common heritage. they plotted a slow constant rate of mitochondrial mutation versus cytoplasm taken from people from all over the globe to arrive at this. you backtrack from all the different mitochondrial dna versions that exist today and reconstruct the common mitochondrial ancestor. sort of like triangulation: you can actually calculate how long ago this common ancestral mitochondria lived and what it's genome was like.
the point is that you can do a sort of "genetic archaeology" with mitochondrial dna because unlike our regular chromosomal dna, which is always being swapped and reshuffled like a giant deck of cards sexually and via transposons and all sorts of wacky chemical promiscuity... mitochondrial dna is relatively stagnant, change-wise. that's because:
1) it's only passed down from one parent, the mother (no recombination)
2) it has a very tiny amount of genes, many orders of magnitude smaller than a single chromosome
3) it is the cell's fuel supply and is extremely vital to survival... so tinkering with it is very dangerous and most mutations would immediately result in dead offspring and never get passed on.
so what?
well it's kinda "neato" to think that in 1,000 years a future "genetic archaeologist" can probably trace the mitchondrial tweak mentioned in this article to all of these children's offspring down the generations... a different kind of mitochondrial eve here, if you will, with a different kind of original sin: tinkering with the human genome...
i'm no religious freak, but the parallel is somewhat profound if you please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
> I guess you are right in a way, though. There's no
> population problem, just too many humans.
Well, here's a different spin for you. Too many humans for what? If there were really too many humans, we'd start dying off for lack of resources to live.
> Replace some with Siberian Tigers, Giant Pandas, etc
> and so on - and don't forget to replace a few greedy
> Brazilians with some foliage for the Amazon Rainforest
> (where a lot of Earth's oxygen is converted.)
What is it that makes these beings intrinsically better than the humans you'd replace with them? Why tigers as opposed to carrier pigeons or flies or mushrooms? If diversity is your goal, I have to ask why you only chose endangered mammals and forest in a particular area.
> Even the suggestion that Earth can maintain a lot more
> population is an insult to anybody even mildly interested
> in the state of the environment. Humans are the WORST thing
> to ever happen to this planet and I'm including the asteroid
> that killed the dinosaurs and the effects of the ice age.
Actually, it's only an insult to those even mildly interested in the current state of the environment. As per your statement about humans being the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth, why is it that the state of the environment before humans came around is a "better" state than the state we're in now? If biodiversity is the most important factor in your equation, then by a huge margin the asteroid (some scientists think it was a comet) that wiped out the dinosaurs by fundamentally changing the Earth's environment is the winner, since it eliminated many more different species than the paltry efforts of humans to date. But again, why is the particular state of biodiversity we have today any better or worse than then, or Precambria, or any other time, for that matter?
I have discovered that in large measure those that say that humans beings are "destroying the Earth" are more accurately stating that we're slowly altering the environment toward rendering it unsuitable for higher mammalian life. This isn't destruction of the Earth by a long shot. The Earth will go on in this state, and most life forms will adapt to the new environment, just like what happened to the Earth during every Ice Age. It would truly suck for humans and other higher mammals, but the Earth has been there before and will be there again.
Please don't interpret this to mean that I think that humans should therefore rape the planet until it won't support us any more. As a human myself, I'd really like to see the Earth continue in a state compatible with the continuation of my species. My post is simply to make you think about why you consider any species as intrinsically more important than any other, and to remind you that the Earth won't take personally the damage we do to the environmental state, but we as humans should. Let's make sure we're angry about the right thing here.
Virg
>Presently United States accounts for 25 % of
>world's carbon dioxide emissions while having
>only less than 5 percent of the population.
And while producing more than 33% of the world's GDP. We emit more pollutants because we produce most of the world's economically valuable products. Perhaps you should start by trying to make the remaining 95% of the world's population a little more efficient and productive rather than bitching about the people who are doing most of the work in producing your Birkenstocks and iMacs...