Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease
bbc.com
bbc.com
His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.
This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.
I agree that DNA in mitochondria is much smaller than DNA in the nucleus. But in each person there are many mitochondria and they nay have slightly different DNA. And the DNA in mitochondria has a different variation than the DNA in the nucleus. So it's difficult to weight both.
Can we say 2.1 parents? A long time ago I read that most binary classifications are not completely binaries, it's just that 2 options cover almost all the cases. (Are virus alive?) I guess integer classifications also have hidden corner cases.
I also remember from a biology book that in a lab they mixed two blastula(?) of small lizards(?) or something like that. They had different skin color and the baby had patches of both colors. Does that count as 2 or 4 parents?
Anyway, it's a very slow procces, IIRC like millions of years. We can ignore it in the human escale.
Also, both DNA use a sligtly different genetic code. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics
> For most organisms the "stop codons" are "UAA", "UAG", and "UGA". In vertebrate mitochondria "AGA" and "AGG" are also stop codons, but not "UGA", which codes for tryptophan instead. "AUA" codes for isoleucine in most organisms but for methionine in vertebrate mitochondrial mRNA.
So it's not as easy as cut&paste.
human nuclear genome size (haploid): 3.1 billion bp
mitochondrial genome size: 16 000 bp
1 human nuclear genome per egg -> 3.1 billion bp nuclear DNA
100 000 mitochondria, each with 1-10 genomes per mitochondrion [1] -> 1.6-16 billion bp mitochondrial DNA
So the ratio of mitochondrial to nuclear DNA in human eggs is on the order of 0.5 to 5.
> I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss.
Unlike previous attempts, the donor mitochondria are not transferred into the mother egg. Instead the donor cell is denucleated, and the nucleus from a mother's egg is transferred into the denucleated donor cell. Consequently, there is a wide variety of donor specific material, which may influence the early stages of development and only "wash out" after a number of cell divisions.
> But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.
How so? Arguably, mitochondrial genes are much more essential than most nuclear genes.
1. Mutations in any mitochondrial gene often have dire consequences, whereas variants in nuclear genes are much more frequent.
2. Mitochondrial DNA is the most expressed in pretty much any cell by a huge margin. Mitochondria express 13 (IIRC) protein coding genes and two dozen other RNAs. Those 30 odd genes often make up 1-5 % of a cell's whole transcriptome. Only genes coding for ribosomal RNA are more strongly expressed.
Maybe if you suppress the immune system, introduce working mitochondria, and then stop taking the immunosuppressants, any mitochondria that are still outside cells get cleaned up and the ones that got absorbed are shielded and can do their job.
it's not possible, these are organelles that are too big to be taken up by your cells, unless you can magically teleport them somehow to each cell
My daughter doesn't know why we have archaic laws around seatbelts either, but she's 3.
The seatbelt laws are not archaic by any meaning of the word, and they can be justified with rational arguments.
Care to try doing the same for family thing? Aside from tradition.
(I'm not supporting the argument, just saying that it's not hard to come up with a plausible rational one)
The modern nuclear family is, well, modern. Children were collectively raised in most cultures. (Certainly almost all that gained prominence.)
(genuine questions)
The earliest evidence for nuclear families is in Germany, going back 3,000+ BCE [1]. We next seem it gain prominence in 13th-century England [2]. Otherwise, the default for non-nomadic societies was kin (extended family) or community oriented childrearing. Similar to what we see in traditional family structures in South America, Southern Europe and Asia.
> could also see the argument that parental role is diminished in modern society with the outsourcing to public schools
It would be difficult to make this argument given the primacy of parents in public schooling compared with e.g. their diminished role in kin- or community-based childrearing systems.
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117192915.h...
[1] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/97813151...
Amazing the domino effect.
He's currently working in the genetic disease space: https://www.paediatrics.ox.ac.uk/news/former-uk-prime-minist...
Another thought, what about three parent households engaging in IVF? Will this be an option to have 3 biological parents regardless of disease? How will we keep records properly? What are the legal consequences? Do mitochondrial parents need to pay child support?
Absolutely not. This is in vitro:
>> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.
In vivo would make no sense.
It would certainly be one of the more stranger ways to explain the birds and the bees
Are women carrying partial people in their eggs?
If most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant then should we monitor urine and arrange funerals for those lost?
Yes.
> If most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant then should we monitor urine and arrange funerals for those lost?
Weird strawman.
> According to the Metro, several states have prosecuted women for miscarriages or stillbirths. They include South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, Texas, California, Mississippi, and Ohio. It appears West Virginia has joined the ranks as well.
> Though California has since passed laws banning criminal charges and investigations of pregnancy loss, it previously jailed two women for stillbirths.
Also:
> Raleigh County Prosecuting Attorney Tom Truman told WVNS 59News that a number of criminal charges under state code, including felonies, could be levied against a woman who flushes fetal remains, buries them, or otherwise disposes of remains following an involuntary abortion, also called a miscarriage.
We've established arbitrary lines on when the embryo progresses to the point of having a legally mandated funeral in some parts of the US.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/new-law-in-us-state-could-le...
Comparing abortions to harvesting organs from cloned humans? I agree, definitely a weird strawman.
Not how that works.
1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.
2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.
3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.
4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.
_________
[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer
That's like someone who says "cows are people" and wants the death penalty for hamburgers, but they're a-OK with dairy farms and leather.
It shows that even the proponents of the slogan don't actually believe it.
Or something like that... can't remember how it goes exactly.
The only reason why you would say that there is no way to prevent them is that I infer from your posts that you are most likely against embryo selection.
Because it's already a national political consensus?
National health organizations go to serious lengths to make sure women are not unknowingly consuming things which would cause them to miscarry. Assaulting a woman and causing her to miscarry is penalized with charges above and beyond what would be assigned if not for the miscarriage. Societally, we try to encourage people to be gentle, careful, and accommodating towards/with pregnant women, and to encourage mothers to not drink or smoke while they're carrying.
What strawman world are you living in where this isn't the case?
What does not exist is a consensus that a blastocyst is (consistently) equal in personhood to a newborn, with equal levels of loss and tragedy. I trust that this is obvious without the need for lurid comparisons.
So while the two vectors may share a direction, the amplitudes are very different. Kind of like how it's important to floss your teeth, it's not so important that failure becomes a crime.
If one actually does that, reading it literally and without context, then it becomes a flat-out lie: The vast majority of biological "life" on the planet never involves "conception" at all.
What do you think it means?
If you label something as a "strawman", that means you are already aware of distinct and relevant differences between it and the "real" thing.
But instead of presenting those things that you claim to already have, you're running away, unable to explain your own words! Much like someone that hurled "strawman" as a reflexive insult after they felt uncomfortable reading the text.
Your rhetorical games belie your ability to engage in simple discussion.
Good luck!
DNA required by mitochondria are both in the mitochondria and in the nucleus. This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two; or the genetic distance of the donor might matter.
Still TBD whether other problems arise. If they do, I wonder if the affected person has any ability to get medical records of the other subjects, to compare diagnoses or treatments, notwithstanding privacy protections.
DNA that codes for proteins that are required by the mitochondria...
The DNA in the nucleus itself does not make its way to the mitochondria.
> This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two
There is plenty of co-evolution between the two. But the idea that the genetic distance between donors doesn't matter is pretty substantiated by the fact that people of two races can have children.
In modern science, the idea that humans can be separated into "races" genetically is completely debunked. All humans are members of the genus Homo and more specific the species H. sapiens. Two people of different skin color may well be genetically more similar than two people of what you would call the same "race."
>The lack of discontinuities in genetic distances between human populations, absence of discrete branches in the human species, and striking homogeneity of human beings globally, imply that there is no scientific basis for inferring races or subspecies in humans, and for most traits, there is much more variation within populations than between them.
I am by no means a callous person, in fact, my therapist tells me I have a problem with too much empathy, and in no way do I wish parents to loose their children so young.
But what I am also not is a eugenicist, which is what this is, eugenics.
"Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population."
Now remember, first they are only preventing the chance of a baby being born with mitochondrial disease. But more importantly, these mitochondrial diseases are still evident in the human population because there is some survival advantage. This is what happens with sickle cell disease [1]. The sacrifices these babies make, dying so young, is a sacrifice for the survival of a genetic population. In the case of mitochondrial diseases, this favors the survival of female babies over male babies, or even the benefit of higher amounts of oxidative stess in the mother to fight off infection.
So by this method, even the female baby will be born without the Mitochondrial mutation. What will this mean for her?
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/mitochondrial-dna-evolu...
"Accordingly, their model revealed that some mutations confer a net replicative advantage over unmutated (wildtype) mtDNA, causing the mutant mtDNA to proliferate within individual organisms."
We know so little and we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are gods and accept our fates. Eugenicists thought they knew what the best genes were to survive, and this is no different.
[1] https://globalhealthnow.org/2024-06/how-sickle-cell-disease-...
This is different, another step in the erasure of genes that harm humans. This is not a genocide.
It seems like your argument boils down to we should continue to have horrible suffering and early death because diversity of DNA is good and we shouldn't edit out potentially helpful mutations (that also cause horrible suffering) - if we can beat malaria, why would we need sickle cell?
[0] https://3billion.io/blog/whole-genome-sequencing-cost-2023
These activities are in no way evidence for people thinking (too?) highly of themselves or "as gods". Just a completely made up accusation.
I also don't see why the scary labels are relevant necessarily. To be afraid of whether this qualifies as eugenics or if you qualify as an eugenicist is sitting backwards on the horse completely. But maybe I just misinterpreted your catious wording and there's no being afraid here - in other comments you outright state you consider this eugenics, for example.
> [As] Humanity[, we need to] accept our fates.
No, we really don't. Though if you and people of the same opinion just accept fate, you also accept this research and similar continuing on, so maybe this is not even a point of debate in practice.
It doesn't matter if something or someone qualifies as eugenics or not. What matters is the outcomes of the actions. FollowingTheDao seems to be concerned about long term consequences on the overall population which may be best served by individuals accepting their babies will die. Or it may not - but it's worth discussing without going into pedantry about the meaning of words.
Kinda funny to attack TFA by associating it with a naughty word while tracking in such awful ideas as if we're unable to evaluate the ideas ourselves.
Selective breeding in livestock, mate selection in wild animals and humans...
I do understand your point. I struggle with whether it is cause for (more than theoretical) concern.
The ethical quandaries don't seem that important when it's isolated to expression of personal choice.
State-driven decisions are ugly of course. And perhaps the insanity that we see in dog breeding is very bad.
But we don't see the dog breeding problems in human parents (aside from the initial mate selection, which can be vicious!).
So where does that leave us? Using blunt tools is OK but precise tools are bad?
Are you fairly religious, if you don't mind my asking?
I see Daoism as a scientific, observational life view. To know everything is impossible, and all the God stories say that God knows everything. No one can even know the Dao, all you can do is feel it in a sense. You can get an idea of the laws and let it take you. In other words, acceptance. The Dao (law of nature) controls evolution and why a baby is needed to live or die. We we try to change that we go against the Dao, and that leads to imbalance, and then problems.
For someone averse to human hubris, you repeatedly speak as if you were the voice of the world (nature, "Dao"?), merely spreading the will of the world (nature, "Dao"?). This is also why you were asked if you're religious, I assume.
This goes back to my point of acceptance. Why can’t we just accept the fact that we do not fly? Why do we want to waste all this money and time being something we’re not?
For example, in the 17th century, and then even more so in the 19th century, we discovered that humans can in fact fly pretty decent, provided the right contraption (an aircraft).
Every conceivable thing will be eventually attempted to the extent it can be. One could consider that itself a law of nature, not even specific to humans per se. How hubris enters the picture then, to me remains a mystery.
I think a lot of these biotechs that raise alarms are pretty safe, and the problem is that we’re really bad at explaining in lay terms how it all works, and people naturally assume the worst.
I think it’s also an issue of practicality (and this is where it flirts with being eugenics). What’s the alternative? To tell people not to reproduce if they have known disease prone genes? To make them not reproduce? To tell them they don’t get universal healthcare if they do?
I think mucking about with our building blocks is the least bad option we have.
> What’s the alternative?
Acceptance. These parents can still reproduce. A female child will most likely be healthy, like the mother. And the male child will not always be born with a mitochondrial disease. People do not realize that father's can also pass mitochondrial genetics to their children. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6639/)
In trying to remove all risk from our lives we are making it inherently risky in other, usually unknown, ways.
All the spiritual practices talk about acceptance, so just pick one.
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
You're literally advocating for letting genetic diseases cull the afflicted populations, "selecting for the better genes" that way. Seemingly the exact opposite of your claimed position, I hope you appreciate.
Or you have no problem with selection as long as "nature does it"? That's the best idea I have for reconciling this at least. Are we humans not part of nature though? Is you preferring what nature does not just a preference still?
If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
We're not that smart. Everything has unintended consequences. One example some people have studied is sickle-cell anemia. It's a recessive trait so if you get two copies of the gene you get sickle-cell which is a horrible disease. However, if you only get one copy of the gene it provides substantial immunity against malaria.
Now, maybe in this case you could say, okay, we will cure malaria somehow, not worth sickle-cell existing. But the thing is that gene isn't "the gene for sickle-cell anemia," nor is it even "the gene for malaria resistance and sickle-cell anemia." It affects hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of different things.
I think there are some conditions where I don't have a problem doing that, and sickle-cell, mitochondrial disease, these things do seem "bad enough" to be worth putting our fingers on the scale. But I am not sure it's so clear-cut, and I think it's right to say that eugenics are categorically suspect.
How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.
> Everything has unintended consequences.
People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.
I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance. They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.
> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.
But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?
> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.
How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?
> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.
I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.
> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
Genetic diseases that have survived a long time in our population may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall. He gave the example of sickle cell, but I also recently read about a similar idea with schizophrenia. Suppose we eliminate the schizophrenia genes from the gene pool? We would also lose the benefit they provide - probably to people who don't quite become schizophrenic.
> I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
I think he is claiming that but the vast majority is future generations who die from some other problems that this "bad" mitochondrial DNA was protecting the rest of the population against.
I'm not sure if he meant "a moral" or "amoral" but genes evolve to ensure their own survival and that might be done more effectively by killing a few babies with mitochondrial disease as a side effect of something else.
These unknown benefits of genetic diseases might simply be keeping mutations out. Mutations are going to happen anyway and maybe it's useful to the species for them to be fatal instead of just degrading performance in life which might accumulate over generations. Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
For example,
> may well have some positive selection pressure and may be good to the population overall
How will we find this out if we espouse gene editing in general as bad?
From my perspective, like religious folks in general, they wish for leaving unknowns remain unknown and just being passive; unfortunately, I think this goes against the very essence of life, and our very fundamental biases that come from being alive and perceiving ourselves as sentient.
If I took their worldview to the extreme, I wouldn't be able to do anything: the smallest things would require a full and complete understanding of the entire state of the world, lest I might cause some unintended effect that may hurt me greatly, and so when I do do anything, I'm exhibiting hubris. This is also why I brought up healthcare in general being a best effort, because all active actions in life are at most a best effort due to the impenetrable wall between our perception of the world, and the world in its actuality.
To tie it back to your example:
> Consider a program stopping with segfault vs silently continuing with corrupt memory.
Think about how you can reset your graphics driver by pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B without having to restart your entire system. Or how you continue to write programs, despite not being able to guarantee that the code you write for those programs is actually what's going to execute, on the state you expect them to be executed on, in the environment you expect it to execute in, in a way you expect it to execute. You might get other programs inject themselves into your program, other programs manipulate the memory of your program, the system libraries you call into do something unexpected because 20 years have passed and now things are different, or simply being scheduled out and your program not even receiving CPU time, meaning if your program powered a real time experience, that now ceases to be that way.
So you obviously don’t understand my worldview. I don’t worry about the small things, I worry about the big things. But yes, so careful, because I have empathy. For example, it’s easy for me to throw a cigarette butt out of my window and it’s very convenient and it makes my life easier. But I know the consequences of that are many fold, starting fires, having animals eat the cigarette butt. So I don’t do it.
The topic is about genetic editing and just throwing in the mitochondria of some random woman into the cytostolic DNA of another woman. Does anyone know the effects of that yet, long-term? Not only for the population but for the child?
Has that even been examined before?
Where do you draw the line between small and big things though? I can appreciate if someone tries to go for paraconsistent logic rather than classical when thinking about the real world, but then I think it's important to establish where we both land in there.
In the extreme of too much healthcare for too long, we'll breed humans into being dependent on it. That's a risk because if we somehow stop being able to provide that healthcare, we might die out. On the other hand, maybe we'll always be able to provide that healthcare and we'll become superior in some way as a consequence. This probably already happened with the technology of clothes, cooking, and houses. We depend on those because we're hopeless at digesting raw food and staying warm at night, whereas animals without those technologies are burdened by things like permanent fur coats and more expensive digestive systems, or having to slow down in the cold.
That's general healthcare. The issue here is different - "bad" genes are probably actually good at the population level so do we really want to get rid of them?
I'm not much of a luddite but I really don't think we should manually eliminate any "bad" genes from the gene pool. That's like trying to improve the environment by exterminating some troublesome species without realizing the indirect benefits it provides. Do you also call protecting endangered and apparently useless species a religious like fear of disruption of some higher balance?
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
It's like he managed to be against eugenics, because it's eugenics, but not be against any of the negative consequences that eugenics brought in the past. For me this reeks of someone putting on a facade.
I did not say that at all. Mitochondrial diseases are not transmitted 100% to the children so I am saying go ahead and reproduce and accept the results.
As a parent of young kids, this is a core issue I grapple with. I want my kids to have fun and take risks and learn how to handle the bumpiness of life. But I don’t want my kids being maimed or killed.
I think the argument could be simplified to “we’re collectively better off if we live in a manner where one consequence is that x% of us will get badly hurt.” And I personally believe that’s a true statement.
My youngest was one of the x%. He played in a risky way (that was entirely normal when I was a kid) and later that night a team of orthopedic pediatric surgeons had to put his body back together.
The hardest thing for me is not to be constantly saying “that’s too high; get down from there; don’t go too far; slow down” because that trauma lives with his mom and I far more than it does with him. But I believe it’s important for him to keep taking risks.
I also believe it’s up to each parent to decide how they want to raise their kids. We don’t get to collectively decide for the parents.
Which relates back to the topic: I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism. I believe we cannot decide for people that they don’t get a choice in the matter. Even if one might argue that this poses a collective risk to the population.
The idea of individualism is a hard one for me. Are we really individuals? I mean, we get half our genetics from each parent, so where is the individual? Can any of you live as a total individual, without the assistance of even a small group? When in human history, even primate history, have you seen our species survive without a community?
When a parent makes this decision for gene therapy, that does not just affect the parents, it affects the child (the outcome of which is still not understood) and it affects those child's children.
Natural selection exists for a reason, but the eugenicists think they can control it.
Comparing gene therapy to cognitive therapy (telling your kids to not be stupid), is in no way comparable. Doing gene therapy is not "raising your kids", it is creating your kids.
I am saying this as someone who lives with THREE genetic disorders. von Hippel-Lindau syndrome (Father and Mother, hemangioblastomas), Cystathionine beta-synthase deficiency (Mother, homocystinuria), and a DNM1L Deficiency that leads to mitochondrial fission dysfunction (myoptahy, ME/CFS, OCD, Anxiety, Asperger's).
Correct me if I am wrong because I am absolutely not a historian. Eugenics was horrible not because we understand Mendellian genetics but because it was forced on people in the intent to allegedly "improve" a (political boundary placeholder)'s population in some way that was outright obscene, including use by Nazi Germany and many other places and regimes. US courts, etc.
I think the difference here is that the technology is not forced to be used.
And besides, aren’t we forcing these genetic changes onto the children without their consent?
I have some serious antinatalist leanings, but if one is going to live (assuming decent quality of life and what not) more life is always going to be objectively better.
If there is a way to detect or prevent genetic defects before the kids are born, we should really allow people to make a choice.
And I really don't care if doctors mix genetic material from 3 people to make a healthy baby. It's still a form of evolution. I'd think we should really try to give two people who really want to have a kid a chance to have a healthy kid...
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
They should not mess with genes where the sciences is not 100% settled but that still leaves a lot's of mutations known to be 100% deleterious. There are no benefits in having hereditary blindness, deafness or schizophrenia!
Because I know more about how integrated and complicated genetics is than you?
Now you’re talking about editing out polymorphisms, not even mutations? Did you know the COMT is only a minor risk for schizophrenia, right? And that it not only metabolize is catecholamines, but also estrogens? How did you know the COMT enzyme is stimulated by magnesium and SAMe? Maybe the person needs just more of those than needing to have genetic therapy.
That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever. The fact that the COMT enzyme is also implicated in estrogen metabolism is not an argument for or against editing out the known defective variant of the COMT gene.
There is an argument to be made that we should wait until medical science has the means to cleanly and reliably do a single gene edit but I don't buy the argument that removing a gene variant from the humans genes pool is eugenics therefore it's bad and should be forever forbidden.
When you look at a single gene, you can see there’s no benefit. But when you look at the gene in contacts of the whole genome, there could certainly be a benefit to having a slower COMT enzyme.
For example, in someone with higher homocysteine, this would be an advantage.
So you see the problem, you see the gene is bad because of looking at the gene as an individual, but I see it as probably beneficial when I look at the whole genome. And this is why I am against gene editing. Unless you take the gene, you wanna edit in the full context of the whole genome you don’t see the bad effects it might have in the long run. And who is doing that? nobody.
I've got a genetic disease. I decided not to have kids because I didn't want to pass it on. Ended up with one anyway, and I hope for his sake he didn't inherit it, because I don't want him to have to deal with the problems I have. You might say that's not natural, but humans have evolved to care about our offspring. What can be more natural to a human than not wanting to watch your child suffer?
Your argument could be used to justify abandoning health care altogether. I should have died of gangrene when I was 12, but I had ingrown toenail surgery that saved my life. I wear glasses, surely that goes against natural selection since I wouldn't be as fit a mate as someone with 20/20 vision. My girlfriend had breast cancer, should her children have grown up without a mother for the sake of the species? Should I abandon her because her breasts and ovaries were removed and she's no longer a fit mate?
Evolution is just a process, and one we've been opting out of for thousands of years, ever since the first human helped another human survive something that should have killed them. Don't make Darwin your god. The irony would spin his coffin right out of the ground.
Of course, science fictions authors,scientists and philosophers have written plenty of material on the matter and the danger of such societies... and it might blow up in our face one way or another, but nothing aside of our demise can stop scientific progress...
What got"eugenics" in disrepute was the evil things done to people with "bad" traits:
- Killing them
- Forced sterilizing of them
- Forced abortion of their fetuses
That's awful, but because of the means, not because the goal of a healthier population.
If there was a cheap and cost effective way to edit your genes as an adult in a 100% safe way, then everyone would be doing it.
The reason why eugenics has a bad reputation is that there are incredibly low tech solutions that require an authoritarian surveillance state and such states have indeed existed and abused their powers in the past. I'm talking about forced sterilisation.
The first problem with these low tech approaches is that their models suck and aren't founded by actual genetics research. E.g. fascists defining their own ethnic group as superior over other ethnic groups.
The second problem is that they didn't just think that they were helping the people born through eugenics avoid diseases or become better people, they were thinking that people with the wrong genes shouldn't procreate or exist at all, because they are a waste of resources and therefore should be killed even if they somehow manage to deal with their complications.
But if we take a step back and start off with a higher level of technology and scientific progress, these concerns turn out to be meaningless.
If there is a gene that objectively causes a disease or harm and it can be identified reliably, then having children with that disease becomes morally questionable. This means some people are prevented from having children that they would otherwise want. However, if there is a technology that allows people to have children without the disease, then suddenly the opposite happens. It becomes a moral imperative to give them access to the treatment so that they can have children. In the extreme limit, no matter how bigoted an eugenicist is, he must always allow even the most "inferior" people (in his eyes) to have children and procreate. The discriminatory part of eugenics collapses into itself as if it never existed.
This then leaves the actual problems with eugenics: lack of genetic diversity and unforeseen consequences of unrestricted gene editing.
The solution to this problem would be to never implement precise genetic editing in the first place. Instead, whole chromosomes should be swapped out. This will increase genetic diversity by allowing a single child to have the combined genes of multiple fathers and mothers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm
So the sperm’s mitochondria are degraded, and I guess, you don’t want somatic cell components for various reasons.
The truth is of course much more complicated than my limited understanding.
Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
But that (fostering human life) is also not a settled debate if the laws in some states are any indication. But debate is hard in jurisdictions where minority opinion can hold sway (like in Florida where a referendum hit 57% for enshrining a right to abortion).
While I'm resolutely pro-choice and don't consider a fertilized cell to be "human", (before I continue I want to be clear, I 100% support these types of procedures in the article) there is eventually going to be a grey area where debate needs to happen before we hit Gattaca-style dystopian editing.
PS This is not meant to argue against your view per se, which I disagree with but respect. I mean to illustrate how very quickly this gets messy and rational debate flies out the window. But that's the same with anything political in today's climate... :-/
It seems you mean to imply that you are against the destruction of a fertilized viable embryo, but then the rest of your message seems to suggest that it isn’t that important.
How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).
The article seems clear. Another comment [1] suggested it should be possible to do as you suggested but I certainly do not know the science in this space.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44617740
> The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization
The article further refers to "donor" and "parent" embryos. This is also not correct as far as I undestand, eggs turn embryos once the fertilization process completes, and a zygote is present. [1] Even this could be considered misleading as there's also an "embryo proper" which forms about a week later still, but I wanted to keep to the reference frame of the GP.
I found [2] particularly informative because it outlines a multi-stage process through which an embryo goes, the earliest of which is fertilization as you described. My reading in the article, and perhaps relying too much on the artwork, seems to put the process described there at stage 1b-1c since the pronuclei looks to be in the process of fusing. My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
> They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed).
I wish I'd had the context to appreciate this before my earlier reply. :)
I also enjoyed reading parts of [3] and imagine there is probably better information nearly 60 years later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_embryonic_development
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_stages
[3] https://publicationsonline.carnegiescience.edu/publications_...
No, I believe what happened is that they made their mitochondrial changes before the pronuclei fusion, and inserted this modified egg into the womb. There it the continued on with the fertilization process, finishing up, creating the zygote, etc.
The embryo-proper bit was only relevant to the "from what point is it a human life" part of this, it is not relevant to the procedure specifically. That comes a whole week after fertilization I believe.
Frankly, advice on having children from celibate men doesn't need special consideration from women.
I say this as someone who was at least raised Catholic and still has an affection for the faith.
https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...
That doesn't mean the Church's teaching isn't final and binding.
Teachings can be reversed and they are absolutely not binding. These disputes are supposed to be done in humility with the assumption that the church is probably right, but that's pretty much the same as arguing with Linux kernel devs...
https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-is-the-difference-between-d...
People who have trouble naturally conceiving a child?
It is a tool, like guns, bombs and medicine.
I'm OK with being alone, that doesn't make me right or wrong.
It does mean I have courage of conviction though.
It's got nothing to do with right or wrong.
Not agreeing with something maybe because of courage, cowardice, nonchalance or anything else.
Openly disagreeing with the in-group cannot be nonchalance, almost by definition (if you don't care, why bother having an opinion?), and it can't be cowardice if the issue matters.
Where did you come from?
Rather kids deserve parents.
It's literally an inversion.
Having biological kids is a hard-wired instinct, and one of the very basic survival-of-the-genes things. I have no idea what you mean by kids deserving parents. There are no kids without parents to begin with.
Men's sexual drive, for example, is tuned to fairly rapey if not for a "patriarchal" society that crushes this drive through the threat of a girls father beating a boy to a pulp. Stats are pretty clear here too wrt sex workers and their relationship to their fathers.
And IVF is a tragedy of rented wombs, unfulfilled motherhood dreams, expensive and painful surgeries almost exclusively brunt by women whilst profited by men.
But I'm not worried. A society that inverts the child-parent merit is one whose open loop gain is less than one. It's pretty obvious why: those who think children are deserved are unlikely to have the ability of self-sacrifice to want more than the one, maybe two kids.
Children are celebrated. Rape is abhorred. I have no idea what you mean by IVF is rented wombs and profited by men. Are you confusing IVF to surrogacy?
(the same as with pro-choicers and third trimester abortions for example)
Or adopt?
This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children.
This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision.
You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out.
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.
God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come
And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty?
Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line.
"Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted.
It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so.
And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.
In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.
Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.
As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.
Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem.
Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel.
There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either.
Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this.
IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
You're talking about experimenting on non consenting subjects. Why stop at 3 parents. Why not 300. Splice in all the DNA you want.
Then 20 years later when the test subject has horrific side effects due to processes we don't understand, ohh well that's the cost of progress.
Very young kids cannot consent to any treatment, and if we said "no treatments without personal consent of the patient", we wouldn't be able to treat sick newborns at all.
"ohh well that's the cost of progress"
Yes, it is. We can be a bit more careful, but progress is ultimately risky, because you are entering an unknown terrain. A lot of modern products that you now safely use, including electricity, air travel and banal over-the-counter medications, has a nontrivial body count. If your attitudes prevailed, we would have none of those.
Before trying to play God and manipulating the very fabric of life itself you can be a foster parent or have a very frank conversation with your partner on your options.
No one’s going to know the long term effects of this until 20 or 30 years later.
“Sorry Billy , you have painful incurable diseases because we created you with experimental procedures that required merging multiple embryos together, good luck.”
What if this creates completely new genetic illnesses? Might not happen this generation, might happen 2 or 3 generations down to the line.
Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family.
Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.
This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.
And there's plenty of foster kids, like Dave Thomas who was adopted as a foster kid.
So was my friend D. D's adopted parents asked the state of NJ for the kid that needed parents the most. And boy did the state of NJ deliver.
D had a foster home raided by the FBI. Another foster house beat him. He didn't know how to read until grade 5.
Now he has masters in microbiology from a top 20 program, a job as a data scientist and he's making the better part of $200k to take care of his wife and three kids.
As annoying as he is (he is from Jersey), I know he's a guy I can call who will show up to help.
All because a couple of God fearing parents asked NJ for the most messed up kid in the system. For me, D's parents are saints.
It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
He's now a well paid classical musician. He's just like any other cousin. If anything he's MORE successful than the rest of us!
Once I spoke with a woman who was annoyed she wasn't able to adopt a child from a specific country that matches her ethic/cultural background.
Like she's shopping or something.
She's too good to adopt from the community she actually lives in.
>It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.
My feelings exactly. Their are absolutely no shortage of kids who very much need good homes.
They aren't perfect, a lot of them are going to need a bit of help like your friend.
As for children within the country, the majority is multi-handicapped children, most of which cannot say at a normal home full time. So the adopted family basically become a place to put the children during the odd weekend or vacations. This isn't a family life, this is you helping the government at your own cost with no benefit to you. As harsh as that sounds, it's not something most people can do. It's incredibly taxing mentally, and you're still not getting your wish of a family.
That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years. Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different.
Specifically, American parents tried to return to sender a kid they didnt like. Ie they thought they deserved a kid.
"Adoption from abroad is tricky at best, and now it's no longer possible. [...] That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years."
Being a parent is a about giving yourself away. If you cant do that you're not ready or suitable for a kid.
"Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different."
Who deserve loving families.
Look, I haven't adopted a foster kid: because Im scared Im not good enough; I admit it. But let's not pretend that there aren't a plethora of kids in need of families that we must have IVF for those who are not capable of conceiving their own.
I get that systems are different around the world, but solutions like this is still required or at least wanted in countries where adoption is pretty much not an option. It is a pretty fortunate situation to have a society where adoption is so rarely needed, but it's also massively hurtful to would be parents to suggest that they should simply adopt, when they want to, but does have that option.
Btw, his birth mother was alive until five years ago. He found her through 23 and me just months after she'd passed.
When I was in undergrad there was this 16 year old street urchin (for that's what he'd become) who'd hang out with us. He was a foster kid, and his was a life long story of abuse and neglect.
He was a nice kid too and, despite all the drugs he took, he could have been very smart.
What contrast good parents make.
Most foster kids have complicated situations, which I suspect a lot of people wish to avoid. But ultimately it’s going to be work either way.
I’m not opposed to IVF, but this story is just strange. They have to create a healthy embryo from the donor egg, instead of just using that healthy embryo, they rip its DNA out to shove into another embryo.
Feels like a story of just because you could doesn’t mean you should. I’ll take all the downvotes, I’d wholeheartedly vote to ban splicing multiple embryos together like this.
The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.
From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
There are people who have a deep emotional need to control other people's lives and use all available tools to do that.
There are also people who don't have that need at all and would very much like to use the same tools to improve themselves or their children.
These are two separate groups but "we" are limiting the second group's access to tools in order to prevent the first group from misusing it.
In fact, some people tabooize the tools and intentionally attack even the second group for using them because they either afraid of the first group or, more often, because they are not even aware there are different types of people with different motivations and driving needs.
There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural".
Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.
Drugs are in fact how we come to understand this chain of causality, piece by piece.
So yeah, what you describe is obviously the dream (hand waving through some ethical considerations) but we just don’t know anywhere close to enough about the biology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we unbanned you because you promised you wouldn't do this kind of thing, and your account seems to have reverted to the earlier pattern. I'm not just talking about the current comment—I mean the pattern of using HN primarily to comment on political/national/religious/ideological topics. If you would please fix this so we don't have to ban you again, that would be good.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...