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UK Government Backs Three-Person IVF
Dupple writes "The U.K. looks set to become the first country to allow the creation of babies using DNA from three people, after the government backed the in vitro fertilization technique. It will produce draft regulations later this year and the procedure could be offered within two years. Experts say three-person IVF could eliminate debilitating and potentially fatal mitochondrial diseases that are passed on from mother to child. Opponents say it is unethical and could set the UK on a 'slippery slope.' They also argue that affected couples could adopt or use egg donors instead. Mitochondria are the tiny, biological 'power stations' that give the body energy. They are passed from a mother, through the egg, to her child. Defective mitochondria affect one in every 6,500 babies. This can leave them starved of energy, resulting in muscle weakness, blindness, heart failure and death in the most extreme cases."
Unethical - adj. A word describing anything I don't like that makes me feel bad regardless of whether I have actually considered the thing in question.
If it's so controversial, why not just get the mitochondrial dna from the father?
Because it's not easy. This method (see article) uses an egg from one women, an egg nucleus from another women and sperm from a man. If you can get the father to produce an egg then you're easy non-controversial fix just might work.
This at all, but there are many, many desperate children that feel so hopeless and lonely right now in some orphanage, that really do need someones love. I hope more people give thought to that, rather than the ever over-population of our Mother Earth.
That depends how you define "biological children" - mDNA is a separate string of genetic code that does one specific thing. AFAIK it has no effect on physical or mental attributes (except those that might be affected by the problems caused by faulty mDNA). So no, it won't help lesbian couples - there still has to be a daddy, so far.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What's controversial to me is choosing to have a baby with defects.
Science discovered a way to make a three-way boring
crazy dynamite monkey
It has already been done. If you are unaware of this, then you know that you are not a member.
Science discovered a way to make a three-way boring
It isn't slippery, that's the problem.
Could this be used by lesbian couples in the future to have babies that are biological children of both parents? Obviously, such children would always be daughters, but I'm curious whether this sort of technique would help them.
"Parethenogenesis", in mammals, is still very much in the lab. If memory serves, they've gotten some rabbits and a few mice, and some human demo cells(either not allowed to, or unable to develop past very early stages). I don't think anybody suspects it of being fundamentally intractable; but you can't exactly head down to the local fertility clinic and get it done.
How many chromosones to bake up a new baby?
What the article fails to mention, is that the mitochondrial genome contributed by the "3rd parent" is about 16,600 bp in size, or less than 0.00052% of the total human genome.
The source/lineage of the mtDNA isn't the controversy. The controversy is many-fold.
First up, a donor embryo is sacrificed in the procedure. You can imagine what groups don't like that.
Second, the procedure is remarkably similar to cloning. All sorts of people aren't so sure about that.
Finally, it's highly experimental. If something goes odd, the child may (or may not) have to live with it for a long time. Teasing a nucleus out of one cell and sticking it in another is a bit disruptive to say the least.
Watch the daily show from last night to see what unnatural things are natural. And I didn't mean any offense to anyone who has children with "defects". It's just a choice I would have trouble making.
If I understand correctly, this process uses two women and a man. One woman donates the egg with half a genome, the donor male provides the other half and the second woman provides the mitochondrial DNA.
One thing that worries me is that this choice seems to be on the rise, especially with Downs Syndrome (possibly due to the trend of more births late in life, where that lateness reduces the chances of another successful pregnancy). I see it everywhere now in the progressive community in which I live. I would go so far as to speculate that in centuries past, child sacrifice may have been nature's way of dealing with such defects. Humans that would not have survived in the natural world are kept alive in our increasingly artificial world. Nice talking to you.
The reason is that the nucleus of a cell is relatively huge. Mitochondria are 'almost' independent living cells wholly contained within our cells, and each has it's own DNA. But they're small compared to the nucleus.
Roughly speaking, it'd be like the difference between removing the pit of a cherry vs trying to remove every seed out of a watermelon the size of a cherry.
I don't read AC A human right
What's controversial to me is choosing to have a baby with defects.
What's controversial to me is why you or anyone else care what choice people make when dealing with the very personal issue of which children they choose to have.
The slippery slope is that perfecting this technique is a stepping stone to designer babies.
Apparently, the current technology allows replacement of the whole nucleus, allowing the nucleus of a fertilized egg w/ defective mitochondria to be placed into another fertilized egg with healthy mitochondria. The implication is that this fertilized egg is placed back in the mother (but it could be anyone). Many folks are pretty sure that we are pretty close to the ability to selectively replace a few chromosomes in that nucleus during the swap. Presumably, the first application of this would be to replace/remove a obviously defective chromosome (say trisomy-21 aka down's syndrome) which seems like it might be the first step down the slope.
As mappings of gene-expressions to chromosomes get more accurate, you might imagine that some specific chromosome could be selected for (take all the chromosomes except #k and get that from some other place). Although you might think that the next step might be making a kid with the "best" selection of chromosomes from a single mother and father, identifying a gene in a chromosome is currently a destructive procedure so that's not an easy path to take. Instead, the next logical step (if you allow for N>2 people in the procedure) is to pick a known good chromosome from a 3rd party. With enough 3rd parties involved, you pretty much have a designer baby... ;^)
Of course there is an ethical side to this as well (gotta create/destroy a bunch of *human* fertilized eggs to do this) and that doesn't sit that well with many folks.
Going to these extremes to avoid adopting one of the tens of thousands of existing children who need families is a symptom of mental illness.
I'm not sure. Adoption is a complicated and lengthy process, you're going to be scrutinized ruthlessly if you're going for it. In case of a fertility treatment, or even a complicated procedure such as this, you're just one of many biological parents of this world.
Ezekiel 23:20
why you or anyone else care what choice people make when dealing with the very personal issue of which children they choose to have.
Probably because they never ask the children. Yes, it's personal, but the voices of those people who matter most are never taken into consideration.
When you figure out a way to do that, you'll win a Nobel Prize. However, you point out two things, these children are 1) people and 2) they matter, so why would denying them an existence be in their best interest?
While I am not accusing you of this, very often people who put forth this argument are either doing so because of the burden that they would see on themselves as a parent, or the burden on society (assuming they give up the child I would guess), but not on the child being a person who matters.
I wonder if Stephen Hawking had been able to have been given the choice, would he have chosen to live or not? It seems that his life, genetically flawed as it is, although very different from most people's, certainly has been fulfilling. As you, yourself stated, children with disabilities are people and they matter.
Pray tell, why is denying an existence to a healthy child that could have been born instead of a partially or fully disabled child a better option?
It's not an either or situation. If you have a disabled child, you are not denying a healthy child. Prior to conception there are zero children. At conception there is one child. That child is either healthy or disabled, but like Schroedinger’s cat, we don't know until we look. (That is true even if the mother or father have a predisposition for a genetic abnormality, at least for most abnormalities).
You seem to be insinuating a line of reasoning that borders on fallacy. We don't know the full extent to which ALS is caused by the individual contributing factors. We don't even know if the genetic factors that seem to be partly responsible for it in many cases in any way contributed to his mental prowess. The same Stephen Hawking might have never developed ALS if his early life had been different. Given a slightly different prenatal and childhood development, genetically the same Stephen Hawking could have developed ALS without getting the brilliance in exchange. And many other people grew into brilliant minds without suffering from ALS.
There's no reason to assume that a yet-unborn child that to your knowledge will get born disabled or preconditioned for disability with certainty will have an offsetting factor (such as scientific brilliance) with any higher probability than that a healthy child would be gifted.
There is a genetic marker for ALS on chromosome 21 (I think) and a specific test for it. Although it does not run in families, it can be tested for in utero. As such, it would qualify in this discussion would it not? Even if a child born today is predestined to have ALS, just because they will not have the scientific brilliance of Hawking, are you stating that they should not be allowed to live? That sounds like an argument to kill them off unless they have some benefit for society.
They matter. But show me one parent that would willingly choose a disabled child upon conception instead of a healthy one if given an option. Go on, just try.
Again, that is an impossible argument, of course every parent would want their children to be healthy. However, if the mother and father have the dominate genetic traits that will lead to disabilities, it really doesn't matter how many tries they get, their children will have those traits. If only one does, then it is still better than a 50/50 chance the child will, depending on the marker. Even if neither do, there is still a 10% likelihood that there will be a disability.
But, what your question really should be is of asking parents that have had a disabled child and what their views are about it. Would they have preferred their child had never been born? And while there are those that would agree with that sentiment, there are those that would not. Which comes back to the original question of
Why you or anyone else care what choice people make when dealing with the very personal issue of which children they choose to have.
As you seem to be arguing so strenuously, it is a very personal issue that unless you are directly involved with it you cannot begin to make that choice for somebody else.