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Three Parents Contribute to Experimental Human Embryo
gihan_ripper writes "It sounds like the storyline from a cheesy film, but a human embryo has been created using the genetic material from one man and two women. A team from Newcastle University, England, developed the technique in the hope that it could be used to prevent diseases caused by faulty mitochondria. Their experiment started with two ingredients: first, a left over (and 'severely abnormal') embryo from an IVF treatment; second, a donor egg from another woman. The donor egg has all but the mitochondrial DNA removed, then a nucleus from the embryo is inserted into the egg. Effectively, this results in a mitochondria transplant. 'While any baby born through this method would have genetic elements from three people, the nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg. However, the team only have permission to carry out the lab experiments and as yet this would not be allowed to be offered as a treatment.'"
Two chicks at once!
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
There's a kid who's going to spend their whole life dreading Mother's Day.
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Just because they can, should they? Maybe I'm too cynical, but in a world that's already overpopulated it seems counter-productive in the long run to figure out how to make humans the most expensive way possible. I probably need coffee and a Blank Expression.
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It's funny to see this happening with mankind already, since science fiction has long dreamt up advanced human or alien races with triune families, e.g. the Soft Ones from Asimov's The Gods Themselves , and in Larry Niven's Known Space universe it's one of the social innovations that only comes about in five hundred years or so.
Since mitochondria are only passed by the mother, effectively asexual reproduction of those genes, I assume there's less genetic mixing to keep it healthy (I've heard dad's does get in on rare occasions). Would combining mitochondrial DNA sources instead of replacing be of any benefit?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
The next step is to implant the embryo into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Get ready for some madcap fun!
God, I hope they aren't going to patent threesomes now!
If he had a million dollars?
Two eggs at the same time...
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Nothing to see here, move along.
To be clear, I'm not one of these "we must not play God, we're messing around with things we don't understand" types. At the same time, I do wonder if we understand the principles with which we're working as well as the write-up suggests. On the other hand, that is why we run experiments...
The write-up seems to carry some assumptions from our current model of how DNA and genetic inheritance works. "the nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg"... well, ok. Do genetic researchers understand why "cloned" animals don't always look like the parent? I've never heard it explained, and to my admittedly outsider point of view, that seems to raise some questions about how well we understand what determines "appearance and other characteristics" in complex organisms...
Assuming it has the right number of chromosomes, and all the basic genetic material is in the right places, it shouldn't be any different than anyone else. It just won't have whatever genetic disease they're trying to eliminate.
If it's unethical, it's because this is a slippery slope to picking the color of your kid's eyes, and how fast they can run. Think about Gattaca.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Okay, so apparently as part of an experiment, just to see if it could be done, they fertilized human eggs, let the embryos develop for a few days, then killed them. Doesn't that bother ANYONE? Did I read that wrong? It sounds like they're creating people for experiments just to kill them! Yeah, I know a lot of you don't believe an embryo is a person, but I'm mainly posting for those who share my view but might have missed that aspect of the story.
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This short article leaves out the interesting issue of maternal RNA loading. Part of the reason the egg is so large is due to the actual production of the egg itself. Whereas sperm cells divide from a stem cell into 2 pre-sperm, then 4 sperm cells, a stem cell divides into 2 then 4 daughter cells. Only 1 of these cells becomes the egg, the other 3 are discarded. However, the other 3 pump their cytoplasm into the egg before being discarded, making the egg much larger. This transfer loads the egg with tons of maternal RNA that is free floating in the cytoplasm. This RNA will be used by the egg and newly formed fertilized cell before the cell can begin to make its own RNA. This maternal RNA does have an effect on the cell and its genetic expression. In this situation, the donor egg will have both mitochondria and its DNA in addition to RNA from the donor. While this RNA is only used for a short time, that time is a critical time in development and can control gene expression for the life of the organism.
...this is a slippery slope to picking the color of your kid's eyes, and how fast they can run. If your kids eyes are running around, you have bigger concerns than how fast they're going and what colour they are.GENERATION 25: If you haven't yet, copy this into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. (Social experiment)
Not that this will necessarily make you feel any better about the ethics of the situation, but the embryo they used was a reject from in-vitro fertilization. It was going to be destroyed anyway, regardless of whether the experiment was performed. It's a fact that the majority of embryos produced for IVF are never brought to term.
This is nowhere near designer baby capabilities that were prominently featured in GATTACA. This is simply the swapping out of somatic nuclear/genetic material from one cell to the other, taking advantage of the fact that mitochondrial lineages propogate clonally. This isn't a genetic disease in the sense that you're thinking; it's not a disease found in the human genome. It's a disease isolated to the genome of one of our organelles ("organs" for our cells).
Quick bio recap: I don't know if you remember much from high school biology, but there are 2 sources of DNA in our cells, mitochondria and nucleus. The experiment in the article is essentially swapping mitochondria between 2 people, allowing someone to live without a potentially life threatening mitochondrial defect. In other words, once the mitochondria have been swapped (or in this case, genomic DNA), the person SHOULD develop as he would if he had normal mitochondria in the first place. The only reason I say SHOULD is because we don't know how the RNA content of the genome receiving cell will affect development (as opposed to maternal RNA in the donor cell). But, the person's genetic make up would be the same in both scenarios. I cannot emphasize enough that there is no specificity in what genes are transferred; you cannot pick and choose what gene gets moved, and from what I know, I don't think you ever CAN. You're moving a whole GENOME here.
Now, unless different mitochondrial lineages can affect ATP production to fuel bodily/cellular processes, conferring an advantage somehow by having more efficient ATP production or what not, this type of treatment isn't going to generate the same class divisions and prejudices you saw in GATTACA. Lastly, the kid who results from this treatment wouldn't be a mutant; mutations are changes in DNA sequence, structure that prevent proper transcription and translation into protein. These would be examples of genetic diseases, which you mentioned earlier. To further elaborate, cancerous cells could be considered mutants because of a defect in it's DNA sequence, but a person who has cancer isn't a mutant; only a subset of that person's cells, the cancerous ones, are mutant.
Hrm. This is OT, but you wouldn't happen to be mrxak from AmbrosiaSW forums and Aftermath, would you?