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Chinese Experiment Creates Three-Parent Fetuses
what_the_frell writes "BBC News is reporting that a foetus has been created from the eggs of two women and the sperm of one man in China. Apparently, none of the three resulting foetuses survived, but it does raise some interesting questions about cloning, and more importantly, 'Who's your Mama?'"
...a 2 woman/1 man threesome actually sounds unappealing in this context.
This was not cloning. They are using similar technology here, but cloning is embedding the full DNA in an egg, whereas here they only embedded the mother's partial (egg) DNA, then fertilized the egg with the father's sperm.
How is this any worse than using egg/sperm donor for fertilization?
eggs of two women and the sperm of one man
This is also known as a "continental breakfast" at the Marriott.
There was a TV show about this: "My Two Dads". It starred Greg Evigan and that ape, or was it Paul Reiser?
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I prefer RFC 1149 over the outdated technology referred to as "telegrams".
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Hmm. I submitted this story yesterday, but it was rejected. I'm a little upset that it was accepted when somebody else submitted it. Here was my source, from newsday.com.
The Slashdot editors wanted to mix your submission with submissions of the same story from two women, but unfortunately, the resulting article's HTML failed to pass W3C Standards, and spontaneously aborted all open-source browsers. (IE managed to load it, as it will load all HTML abominations, but immediately installed Gator, and redirected to goatse.cx.)
Continued attempts to mix the article submissions of two women and one man were suspended when it was discovered that there are, in fact, only three Slashdot posters who are women, and in any case one of those is suspected of being a 14 year-old boy in real life.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Oh wait, I thought you said 3 headed fetus.
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Perhaps it's time for everyone to re-read "Brave New World" so we can picture what happens when a society relies on artificially created children...
Yo Mamas are so ugly that when they look at each other they both turn to stone!
Yo Mamas are so fat that when they have a threesome everybody thinks is a foursome!
Ba dum dum!
I don't think Brave New World applies here. This technology is meant to aid in fertilization for those with diffulties otherwise...not the sole method as we see in Huxley's book. Also, it's not like scientists are trying to create different classes of people (alphas, betas, etc). Brave New World wasn't really about creating offspring artifically anyway.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
Actually, there was no DNA from the "second mother" involved in the process.
The problem was that something wrong with the egg of the first mother that resulted in the zygote failing to continue growing after the first cell division.
Their solution here was to fertalize the egg, then remove it's DNA and transplant it into the donor's egg cell that had it's original DNA removed.
I'd very much hesitate to call the donor of the DNA-less egg cell a "mother". She's more of just an "egg cell donor", as none of her DNA would be passed on to a resulting offspring.
Actually, the Cell membrane contains the "mitochindrial(sp) DNA" so... in a way it is all 3...Gooogle mitochondrial dna...
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
So, what is wrong with creating superiour human beings? You know eventually we may have to inhabit places radically different from any place on earth and getting a headstart on such a technology is not only prudent and sane but just and necessary. We simply do not have the time anymore to allow "nature to take it's course" here we are in the 21st century; let the wellspring of progress flow over all the simple notions of good and evil who would betray it.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
There are so many children in the world who have no parents, and these are the lengths to which people are willing to go to have their own biological children?
It's not enough that she can carry a baby to term, it has to be with her own genetic material?
I just don't understand why this is such a great thing. Creating more children for the people who are wealthy enough to pay for this instead of adopting the children that already exist, woo. Pardon me if I'm not excited.
Conversations like:
"Your mama wears Combat boots!"
"Which One - My biological mother #1 or #2? Or the one who raised me?"
----
Angry Wife: "Your Mother is a slut!"
husband: "Which one?"
Angry Wife: "They both are!"
----
Lawyer reading dead wife's will: "Your Wife left everything to your Mother-in-Law."
Greiving husband: "Which one? Her biological mother #1 or #2, the mother who raised her or her step-mother through her fathers divorce last year?"
-----
Dr {reading off of a questionare}: "Has either your mother's or father's side of the family had a history of Diabetes, heart disease, or infertility?"
Ailing Patient {with head in hands}: "Oh god, wouldn't I like to know..."
-----
Besides, just think of what this will do to maternity suits alone!
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
Welcome to a world where they can have tentacle rape scenes in live japanase porn. That is unless the japanese find someway of eating the creature first, they are pretty good about that.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I always rather enjoyed considering myself a "father" since it seems more applicable to the one-time genetic material donation role that many fathers have. Plus it amuses me, since I'm a girl.
Because of egg donation I got to play the heredity game, even without any desire to be a parent, and I think it's a cool option. As for the actual parents using donor eggs, I'm sure they'd be overjoyed to be able to have their "own" child, related to both of them. That's why most of them are seeking fertility treatments and donor eggs instead of adoption in the first place, they desperately want to either experience pregnancy and birth or have genetically related children. I find this urge very strange, but I respect the intensity of it, as what the mother has to go through is even more painful than what I did, and more expensive than you might believe.
I'm sure they'll keep trying until they get decent odds with this technique. They'll make a fortune, some parents will get what they hope for, and some won't.
Pretty much just like conception the old fashioned way, except, of course, for all the money.
Doing my part to piss off the religious right.
In cloning they'll take the genetic material (full set, diploid) from a somatic cell and inject it into an egg (having removed the egg's own genetic material [half set, haploid]). They then do some interestingstuff to convince the egg it's been fertilized so it will start dividing.
In this case they're just removing the haploid DNA from a donor egg and replacing it with the haploid DNA from another egg. Then it's pretty much standard IVF techniques
I'm not sure why this is outlawed. On the one hand it could be the reason many (large mammal) clones die prematurely is because of the nuclear transfer process and all the speculation about telomere erosion and the like are red herring. No one much likes the scenario of some parents having to clean up Junior with a sponge mop due to macroscale apoptosis when he reaches puberty.
I haven't heard much about these kind of trials being conducted in other animals, though. It would be useful, as it would allow you to control for a number of things (aforementioned telomere erosion, for example). I'd assume either the results weren't that interesting (I.E. no significant effect on development or mortality) or the laws banning it were worded broadly enough to ban non-human animal testing as well.
Anyone know whether anyone is doing this in animals besides humans?
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"Derp de derp."
The woman who raised you lovingly is your mama. That means, of course, that some people have housekeepers for mamas, but it also includes all grandmas who've taken over parenting, or adoptive mothers. Unfortunately, that also means that many people with genetic mothers don't have mamas.
Get off my launchpad!
I think they may be taking their overpopulation problem's solution in the wrong direction.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
I didn't read the BBC version, but here's what New Scientist said. Note the importance of the following:
* None were born, but the researchers say this was due to obstetric complications rather than the fertility technique used, and that it would work in future.
*Some children have already been born with three genetic parents, but the new research has prompted additional controversy because the method used shares a technical step, called nuclear transfer, with cloning procedures. However, the US scientist who developed in animals the technique used by the Chinese researchers says: "It's nothing to do with human cloning."
Just thought these would help clarify, so people don't yell "human cloning should be banned!" as a result.
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