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Baby With DNA From Three People Born In Greece (theguardian.com)
A baby with DNA from three people has been born in Greece following a controversial fertility treatment. "The doctors behind the treatment, from Greece and Spain, say it marks a historic advance -- it is the first time an in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique involving DNA from three people has been used with the aim of addressing fertility problems," reports The Guardian. From the report: The experimental IVF treatment, known as mitochondrial donation, involves using an egg from the mother, sperm from the father and another egg from a female donor. The vast majority of a person's genes -- about 99.8% -- are found on the 23 pairs of chromosomes that sit inside the nucleus in each cell in the body, and in the IVF procedure this DNA comes from the two parents. However, a tiny proportion of genetic material also resides in a cell's mitochondria, small structures that act as the cell's batteries and float around freely in the cell body. In mitochondrial donation, the mother's mitochondria are removed from her egg and replaced by a donor's.
The treatment was originally developed as a treatment that could prevent women with debilitating or even fatal mitochondrial diseases from passing them on to their children. The doctors behind the latest treatment claim that mitochondria also play a role in successful pregnancy and suggest that the technique could be applied more broadly as a fertility treatment. The 32-year old woman in the latest case had previously undergone four unsuccessful rounds of IVF.
The treatment was originally developed as a treatment that could prevent women with debilitating or even fatal mitochondrial diseases from passing them on to their children. The doctors behind the latest treatment claim that mitochondria also play a role in successful pregnancy and suggest that the technique could be applied more broadly as a fertility treatment. The 32-year old woman in the latest case had previously undergone four unsuccessful rounds of IVF.
Yeah, overpopulation is a real problem, it creates more problems than solving. But we are getting closer and closer to creating humans with improved genome. More and more new babies will have enhanced intelligence, immunity to many diseases, long live, etc. Such thing already done in China.
Well they NEED to genetically engineer a working class that can survive a 996 workweek.
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sadly, there are reasons why some couples cannot have children: i know of a couple that had infertility treatment, and the result was that their child was born severely handicapped.
i suspect that nature has some form of "checksum" that detects if there is damage to the DNA. in speaking with an expert from the Cambridge Genome Project over ten years ago, what they described to me was that human DNA expresses something very close to a Turing Machine, *including* a byte-code-like "machine language".
when i showed this same person the beautiful pictures of 3D mandelbrot sets that were discovered several years ago and published here on slashdot, he responded, "but those are exactly like the pictures i see under my microscope, every day!"
so it is not outside the realm of possibility that DNA expresses a fully-functioning biological computer, complete with checksum capability. this is why messing with that - trying to bypass the safeguards - through any kind of genetic manipulation - is so incredibly dangerous.
No, a chimera is when you end up with different genetic material between groups of cells. In this case, each cell will inherit the same set of DNA.
Sorry, but improved detection isn't just an excuse. It's the reason. I'm reasonably old and remember my childhood, and back then I went to school with quite a few kids that would be diagnosed with certain mental conditions today, from ADHD to autism. Not the case back then. ADHD was "cured" by smacking the kids 'til they would sit still and autism was just shyness and being weird.
Maybe you're not old enough to actually know that yes, these kids existed back then, too. The difference is just that nobody gave a fuck.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A healthy baby was born and he has people who love him. I don't really see a problem here. It's nice when technology does good things instead of bad.