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British MPs Approve 3-Parent Babies
An anonymous reader writes: A vote of 382-128 in the UK's House of Commons gave approval for a procedure that allows the creation of babies using DNA from three parents. If the measure passes the House of Lords and gets licensed by the fertility regulator, the UK would be the first country to allow such genetic engineering. The medical procedure was designed to help conception when genetic diseases could be passed through mitochondrial DNA. A child inherits mitochondria only from its mother, and these mitochondria have their own DNA, which doesn't affect things like the child's appearance.
The purpose of the procedure is to replace the mother's mitochondria, and that can happen in two different ways. In one method, doctors take eggs from the mother and from a donor, removing the nucleus of both. The mother's nucleus is then implanted in the donor's egg, which can then be fertilized by the father's sperm. The other method is similar, but both eggs are fertilized before the nucleus swap takes place.
There has been lively debate about this issue, with critics raising ethical concerns and questioning the procedure's success rate. They also bring up the slippery slope argument that this will lead to further genetic modification of children. Proponents point out that less than 0.1% of the child's DNA will come from the donor, and it won't affect anything other than the child's health.
The purpose of the procedure is to replace the mother's mitochondria, and that can happen in two different ways. In one method, doctors take eggs from the mother and from a donor, removing the nucleus of both. The mother's nucleus is then implanted in the donor's egg, which can then be fertilized by the father's sperm. The other method is similar, but both eggs are fertilized before the nucleus swap takes place.
There has been lively debate about this issue, with critics raising ethical concerns and questioning the procedure's success rate. They also bring up the slippery slope argument that this will lead to further genetic modification of children. Proponents point out that less than 0.1% of the child's DNA will come from the donor, and it won't affect anything other than the child's health.
This is, I think, more about the social situation then it is about the % of DNA.
People can become a parent even if they have 0% similar DNA. It never has been an issue, so now would it suddenly become one.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
child custody in a divorce? i don't know. might even be some BAD health things.
The UK is now set to become the first country to introduce laws to allow the creation of babies from three people.
Surely it's only not allowed when there was a law disallowing it? Which law was that? Are there other countries that would need a new law to allow it?
Since this story has been around for a couple of days I would have hoped slashdot would know better and have avoided the sensationalist headline. Here's what the experts say.
The biggest problem is that this has been described as three-parent IVF. In fact it is 2.001-parent IVF," Gillian Lockwood, a reproductive ethicist, told the BBC. "Less than a tenth of one per cent of the genome is actually going to be affected. It is not part of what makes us genetically who we are. It doesn't affect height, eye colour, intelligence, musicality. It simply allows the batteries to work properly."
So glad some white upper class inbred nobles can spend money to make their precious baby.
These aren't upper class inbred nobles, and if they're spending their money on it, why shouldn't they? Or must we now have every purchase ratified to ensure it doesn't have any detriment to the world at large? Because then you could wave goodbye to a lot of luxuries.
Given the choice between them producing a string of unhealthy babies that live (in some cases) short painful lives and require round-the-clock care, and them being able to have one or two healthy kids, I'd take this any day.
I've got a better, more practical line that successfully trolls both Republicans AND Democrats in one fell swoop. When you're in a chat room, any chat room, (especially chat rooms like trade chat in World of Warcraft) just say this simple line:
"I think abortion is ok so long as it's only for minorities."
The ManBearPig is that much closer to becoming a reality...
Hell, I'd be surprised if Texas legislators don't respond by going to five parents.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Watching this 'debate', I've been unsurprised; but depressed, at the quality of 'argument' trotted out. The one that particularly annoys me is the "We can't allow it unless we know that it's totally safe and effective! What about possible side effects?!!".
Guess what, kids, there have been precious few medically relevant developments, ever, that came without some human risk. This doesn't imply endorsement of the Josef Mengele protocol for experimental ethics, it's just a fact that we've (so far, I'm all for somebody who can improve this) been unable to avoid, and even the most by-the-book-and-informed-consent contemporary clinical trials are subject to it to some degree. We can't exactly know if it's actually fully safe and effective in humans by use of animal models and pure reason.
Perhaps more importantly, this is a technique to treat disorders that cause grievous impairment and/or early, unpleasant, death. It has long been a commonplace of medical ethics(and simple commonsense decision making) that you don't want a cure worse than the disease; but that nasty diseases can have cures that you would welcome compared to that disease; but would be horrified by in the context of a less serious one(eg. basically all cancer treatment and most surgery). You calibrate your sense of risk based on what the alternatives are, not based on Ideal Perfect Risk Free. In the case of mitochondrial defects, the alternatives suck.
Finally, if you don't wish to allow treatment of mitochondrial defects(effective treatment, that is, there are various, mostly symptom-easing, treatments of not terribly impressive efficacy for the symptoms of mitochondrial disorders; but only swapping out mitochondria, or advanced and aggressive genetic engineering, show much hope for a cure); what do you propose? Do mitochondrially defective would-be-mothers get to roll the dice and hope for a less-sick baby? Do we start charging them with negligent homicide if they keep spawning horribly doomed offspring even after enough failures to know that trying again is dangerously likely to condemn their child to an ugly and swift death?
If you are concerned about 'germline' genetic engineering, this somewhat-uncomfortably-retro 'eugenic' proposal is the other viable option to preventing mitochondrial disease; but I'm guessing that it won't be too popular.
(All that said, I hope that the treatment does work as well as its backers hope, and doesn't turn out to suffer from the drawbacks its critics fear, and if it does turn out to be too dangerous/imperfectly effective, I think that it should go back to the drawing board; but these phantoms of 'need to know for sure that it works' and 'must be proven safe' seem like disgustingly transparent rhetorical devices, not serious ethical arguments.)
Why would they need a new species classification, much less a genus? Your mitochondrial DNA differs from that of everyone else except your siblings by the same mother, and somehow you share a species label with the rest of us. The products of this technique will still have human nuclear DNA and human mDNA, just without Mom contributing half of the nuclear DNA and all of the mDNA, but instead only the nuclear DNA.
Future historians attempting to use mitochondria to trace female ancestry genetically will curse this development(just as the ones attempting to use Y chromosomes to genetically trace male ancestry would curse a hypothetical 'Y swap' corrective procedure for X-linked genetic disease); but it's hard to see an argument for why the product of this technique would be considered anything other than human.
I'm not sure how the issue got the very Daily Mail headline of "3 person babies". By that same logic anyone with a donor organ is a "monster franken-hybrid of two people!".
Essentially it's a transplant (astonishingly) early in that baby's life. Kind of impressive that we could pull it off, actually. Far better that we do something medically that will terminate that line of mitochondria from being passed on to make more people miserable.
That said, the 'poster mom' for this condition Sharon Bernardi has lost SEVEN children to this condition. (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19648992) "...Each of her first three children died within hours of birth and no-one knew why....At the same time, her mother revealed that she'd had three stillbirths before Sharon had been born. Further investigations by doctors revealed that members of Sharon's extended family had lost another eight children between them."
Her 4th child survived until he was 21, living a life of dysfunction and pain;
"..."In the last year of his life Edward was in chronic pain. He had dystonic spasms caused by things going wrong in his brain. His muscles would go into spasm for up to six hours at a time. Drugs could not help him."
"...Sharon and Neil kept on trying for a healthy baby but without luck. Although three more children were born, none lived beyond the age of two. Each time one of their children died, they told themselves that "the death was a one-off". After their last child had a heart attack and died in 2000 they stopped trying...."
I'm sorry, but what the hell? How colossally selfish does someone have to be to just keep pumping out babies that die? There are at least hundreds of thousands of adoptable children *desperate* for parents to love them, your womb is so fucking sacred that you're willing to (essentially) just keep killing babies until you get one that's "of you"?
That's not the most sympathetic figure they could have picked to represent why this was needed.
-Styopa
...our new three-headed overlords.
Side effects include eating like a bird. Contrary to popular belief, what this means is throwing all your food up in the air, putting it in your hair and letting it fall out again before picking it up again and eating it...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's going to end badly. I barely escaped with my life(and several of my most valued colleagues were permanently ontologically disabled or lost all their qualia); when The Incident occurred at the Liebnitz Institute for High Energy Metaphysics. I've seen ugly accidents in physics research, and industrial radiochemistry messes; but nothing nearly as horrific as a monad spallation cascasde exhibiting an unpredicted excursion beyond safe values. I'll never forget the screams.
"critics raising ethical concerns" no seriously, beside religious catholic concern about offing an embryo to save another, what real ethical concern is there *at all* ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Even your siblings are likely to have difference mtDNA.
Not as different as your neighbour, or your father, but different.
mtDNA is copied by an ancient strategy that we stole along with the organelles themselves. It is a bit half-arsed and screws up a LOT more often than the copier used on the rest of our DNA. Which is why we've got adult women whose kids die from mtDNA faults - their mtDNA worked OK, but the copies they're giving to the kids are busted due to a transcription error. We can't fix that (yet) but we can throw it away and give them a replacement.
The kind of Frankenstein that is otherwise similar to their parents except for having functional mitochondrial DNA instead of the flawed mDNA of the mother.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
... but GMO food is OMG DEADLY!
Mitochondrial transplants: Seems to be driven by doctors and scientists genuinely trying to help (I'm assuming that the drug companies would make more money out of sick children). Risk: A few kids are born sick, or go on to have sick children. Tragic on a personal scale, but the world doesn't end. Humans are at the top of the food chain, so its not going to fuck up the ecosystem any more than humans have already fucked it. You're only moving DNA between humans, and with a small number of people. Benefits: parents with bad mitochondria can have disease-free children.
GMO food: driven by Big Agrochem trying to make shitloads of money, acquire copyrights and patents on key food crops and 'bundle' their own special seeds with their own special pesticides and weedkillers. Risks: you're fucking with the bottom of the food chain - screw up and the results will affect everything further up the chain (including us). You don't even want to take a tiny, tiny risk of killing off pollinating insects or having 'terminator' genes or antibiotic markers jump species. Benefits: only if you own shares in big agro (unless you think buying expensive seed and complimentary chemicals from multinationals and not being able to re-plant harvested seed is somehow going to cure third world hunger).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
When we go to space there are several necessary adaptations which would take far to long to arise naturally. First and foremost would be increased radiation resistance. Next would be to have the bones maintain their strength rather than dumping their calcium if they're not stressed. Mobility adaptations would be good, spacial orientation improvements, a lot of other minor changes would be useful but would take centuries to arise naturally. And wouldn't it be cool to have a prehensile tail?
I can see a speciation event in our near future, a divergence from homo sapiens (wise man) to homo specium (space man).
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
This the UK, so the treatment will be available to anyone who needs it, free of charge, just like IVF.
you don't have to match donors because mitochindria haven't mutated in about a billion years. They're functionally and structurally identical now to what they were when eukaryotes first slupped their way across the mud pools. Mitochondria either work or they don't, it's a binary condition since mitochondria have but a single function: to convert chemical potential to usable forms of energy. As such, mitichondrial DNA is exclusively passed along the maternal line - because a: it doesn't need to pool multiple genotypes, and b: it makes possible monoecious or asexual reproduction (plant cloning and bee colonies). This is part of the reason why you hear about the search for "Mitochondrial Eve", the mother of mothers of the Human species.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
If you are going to manually select for better mitochondrial DNA, what's the difference between that and manually selecting every other bit of DNA.
Sure, we select DNA when we choose a mate, but when you're twiddling with it below the cellular level what's keeping people from custom babies? Allowing *just* this will permit for a race of super men, bred for their superior metabolism by simply selecting better mitochondria.
"But this is for fixing a specific disease." Sure, but that doesn't make the results any different. You engineered a "better" baby. Why can't anyone else do that. What makes you and your broken DNA special? I want to engineer out acne & BRCA mutations. Oh, too bad for you, can't pay for custom baby fixing and now your baby is stuck with Alzheimer's. If we're just "fixing" things with babies, red hair is a "defect", let's remove that and replace it with blonde...
IMO, allowing this is a slippery slope.