A girl with three biological parents
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
About me: I do have a mitochondrial disease. In some of my cells, my mitochondrial DNA is not complete. If you think about it as a circle, about one third of that circle is missing. It is called a "heteroplasmic single deletion mtDNA mutation".
1. The mitochondrial DNA, much like the nuclear DNA, is a blueprint for building bits and pieces of our body.
2. The mitochondrial DNA encodes parts that are necessary to build the electron transport chain, i.e., to derive energy from food. In the car analogy, it encodes parts of the core engine (spark, combustion chamber, etc); the last step in the whole metabolic process.
3. The mitochondrial DNA does not encode anything outside of the electron transport chain. So, no blue eyes, no blonde, no smart. Nada.
4. This law will allow some kids to have a normal metabolism and a normal life. Nothing more. Nothing less.
5. I am well aware that this will open lots of possibilities for future genetic manipulation, but bear in mind that mtDNA is much more simpler than nuclear DNA and they are two distinct entities, so this law has no application in the field of traditional (nuclear) genetic manipulation.
Hope this helps.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotopic_expression
[2]: http://archopht.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=18145...
[3]: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.transproceed.2013.11.133
[4]: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/10/what-happened-to...
[1] Mutation specific compounds that will locate and degrade mutant mitochondria. Once degraded, mutant mitochondria will go through the normal cellular housekeeping (apoptosis) http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v19/n9/full/nm.3261.html
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/28e4v3/aubrey_de...
The most promising sign is the metasign - that we can compare and contrast so many different approaches, and complain because some are not getting more attention. Yet overall things are happening.
The next milestone is the approval of EPI-743[1]. Phase III trials have just finished and data is being gathered and analyzed. If everything works out fine, we could see actual prescriptions of the drug one year from now.
Speaking of LHON, take a look at the impressive results[2] of this drug with LHON patients.
I don't get it. Of course on a personal level we have a biological drive, like a hunger, to have children. But on a group level I don't understand why we find it necessary to satisfy that need?
The problem of children with mitochondrial problems being born, as in Bernardi's case in the article, could seemingly be solved by her having had a test to determine if she had mitochondrial disease (ie she would, in the future, qualify for this cytoplasmic transfer treatment) and then her not having biological children of her own. That would also rule out the potential for unknown complications later
To me our current population seems barely sustainable and we already have plenty of orphans in need of families to care for them. It doesn't add up.
Now, I'm sure if I were in the situation of this enabling me to have a biological family then I'd want it, that seems entirely natural. But objectively how does that benefit my community, country, the world?
Eugenics is reproductive control on a very high level, and may go even as far as governmental control on procreation.
Aside the ethical problems with Eugenics there's also a problem raising from simple statistics: In which way shall it be decided who may procreate with whom and who not? Any kind of biased selection eventually leads to a drop in genetic diversity. However the smaller the genetic diversity the higher the chance for illnesses and defects to spread within the population. So if the ultimate goal is genetic diversity the only sound selection would be to make as much mix-and-matches as possible.
Interestingly enough mitochondrial transplantation adds a little to genetic diversity, because it dissolves the meiosis relationship between female nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA.
(1) is it fair to prohibit someone from having one biological child, while others can have five or six, just because she got unlucky in the genetic lottery, assuming she can afford the procedure?
(2) assuming legalization, is the number of children born from parents with this problem really going to have a significant impact in the worldwide population levels? Isn't it like stopping bathing to save water while you continue to water your lawn every day?
Luck doesn't seem to have a scientific basis. No one chose for the person to have an innate biological inability to produce healthy offspring whilst another person does have that ability [to a greater extent]. How is it not fair? Clearly being unfair is allowed as you said "assuming she can afford it", why should financial ability trump biological suitability? That doesn't seem fair nor sensible.
Will children born from parents who are otherwise unable to reproduce, due to their innate biology, contribute to global population increase over the long term? Well, yes, if we allow it to. Or as is suggested here, we choose it.
Use your shower water to water your lawn, make sure you're washing without chemicals that are going to cause a detrimental impact on flora, waterlife, groundwater and such.
To use your analogy I'd say choosing to enable the continued acceleration of global population increase is like legislating to guarantee the use of lawn sprinklers when there's a shortage of drinking water. Your analogy is twisted as without allowing this procedure to take place we will still have more people than we need to continue the human race [of course if we need more people in the future for colonisation of other planets, or whatever, then the argument may well change].
That she has an inability is not fair nor unfair; it simply is. That you chose to criminalize her decision to have children via this procedure is a choice, and in my opinion, it's unfair since it discriminates people and for no good reason.
I'm a fat, lazy slob, and I'm allowed to have children, and she isn't? That's simply wrong.
Clearly being unfair is allowed as you said "assuming she can afford it", why should financial ability trump biological suitability? That doesn't seem fair nor sensible.
Who says it should trump? As far as I'm concerned neither should be restricted from having children. You're the only one arguing for restrictions.
The idea of financial ability was merely to say that my position doesn't require others to pay for it.
Use your shower water to water your lawn, make sure you're washing without chemicals that are going to cause a detrimental impact on flora, waterlife, groundwater and such.
What "chemicals"? It's just a child like any other. We have no reason to believe it's more harmful than mine or yours. If she should prevented from having them, on what grounds shouldn't we prevented everyone else?
To use your analogy I'd say choosing to enable
Ah, but that's the thing. You view this as "choosing to enable". But nobody is asking you to enable anything; just to not throw people who decide to have the procedure done in prison (or fining them or whatever).
On the other side, we've also engineered in the ability for societies with low morals and low intelligence and low natural survivability to thrive on foreign aid and green revolution and raw minerals export.
Maybe we should be fixing this from the angle of letting poor and inefficient cultures starve, rather that preventing more productive cultures reproduce?
Which population?
Population in Africa is barely sustainable, but they aren't getting mitochondria implants there, not even diag.
Population in e. g. Germany is shrinking, they have money and they certainly want to make sure everybody who is willing to bear kids get them.
That's two different populations with different solution.
According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany, Germany's natural population as deaths-vs-births has declined by up to 0.24% (-2.4 per mille listed on Wikipedia) per annum. However, the same page indicates that Germany has the largest migrant population - 10 million people - who are not in those figures.
I've not looked at their population stats in detail but first indications are that their population is not falling.
Natural population of European countries falling doesn't create extra resources on the planet.
Lets turn it around, explain why Germany need an increase in endemic population? How does that benefit the rest of us?
On the other hand, endemic African population can't even feed themself and rely on foreign aid and still starve.
It is obvious that we should make sure stable and productive society remains stable. Yes, lifting Africa out of poverty is important, but more important is not kicking Germany into poverty.
Which might as well happen if we populate it with random starving people from that 8 billion and order them fed no matter what.
So, Germans are going to try to keep their endemic population and culture because they can and should. And the "rest of you" should probably learn how to survive without wasting precious planetary surface.
Personally, I wouldn't be so sure. Having kids is a leap of faith and involves risks no matter what you do, of course, but if I had a problem which a) prevented me from having kids without assistance and b) may result in unknown complications later for my child, I'm not sure I'd do it. At that point being a loving, generous, responsible parent may mean not being a parent at all (or adopting).
I'd have to know what the odds and severity of any potential problems would be in order to compare that to other (normal) genetic risks, though.
>4. This law will allow some kids to have a normal metabolism and a normal life. Nothing more. Nothing less.
But the objection of Dr. Morrow is that the procedure may have risks for the children involved (and their children also). Whenever there are risks as well as benefits, there needs to be a discussion as to what is ethical.
The "third parent" provides mitochondria which, by my understanding, doesn't affect the genetic makeup of the baby. In other words, the parents' genes which form the nucleus are intact and unmodified. Isn't this more akin to receiving an organ transplant than genetic manipulation/selection? Or am I missing the point here.
A "cell organelle transplant" is a good description, I like that!
However, on the other hand, this could actually be a good direction to move in. We can not only eliminate genetic diseases, but also genes that predispose us to other common diseases like cancer.
...and they should. Nobody deserves a suboptimal quality of life due to genetics.
I'm a strong techno-optimist, and I think we should have an extremely open mind to the possibilities offered to us by these advances, and we should fight the tendency to fortify our little local maximum out of fear - but we also need to recognize that some really dangerous things lie ahead.
But genes or not, I brought it up as an example of something that we're clearly NOT comfortable removing (even if we could), although there's still plenty of communities where not being gay "would for some reason improve the child's quality of life".
Why are "we" clearly not comfortable with that?
Indeed, if "we" are all uncomfortable with that then we needn't worry about anyone doing it. You seem to be worried that some people are going to want to specify non-gay children but think they ought to have them anyway. For some reason.
On the other hand I admit it might make me queasy to think of parents deliberately engineering their children to be gay. As in "Oh honey, let's make our third child gay, it'll be fun!"
Yes, especially given the fact that the only reason people have children is because nature intends to replace the parents with their offspring, using rules crafted by natural selection, not the parents' tastes.
In fairness, sex was invented at least 1.2 billion years before parents could have possibly had "tastes". The reason we reproduce sexually rather than just churning out clones of ourselves appears to be that we're more resistant to parasites/diseases if our genes keep constantly shifting into new combinations rather than hanging around for too long looking exactly the same.
This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.
That's certainly high on the list, but replacing one population with another on a regular basis is also on the list.
> This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.
Of course it would. Evolution can be a complex topic, but there's one simple fact at the center -- nature knows more than we do. An organism's ability to survive, to prevail over other genotypes, speaks louder than any of our expressed tastes and choices. That means if parents make the wrong choices, nature will step in and correct them.
In fact, life was so perfect that the writers had to postulate the existence of non-genetically-engineered people in order to have any drama at all. "Wouldn't it suck if you were born into this society without any genetic enhancement?" the movie asks. And the answer is: yeah, so you should genetically engineer your children.
We already bar people with heart defects from participating in space programs.
You mention the heart defect. In the movie, the heart defect is only genetically potential, it is implied that if the character had it they would be dead before the events of the film.
Gattaca is just a scifi movie, not particularly good at science realism. We should not take guidelines for Artificial Intelligence research from the Terminator movies, and we should not take genetics guidelines from Gattaca.
Meh. Neither does anyone else, and it won't happen by itself.
If GATTACA was the cost of everyone being healthy, I might take it, but it won't be. We get the world we want, by and large.
Hmm, not sure about that. The rich get the world they want, by and large.
Progressive damage to mitochondrial DNA is an important contribution to degenerative aging. Wholesale replacement of either mitochondria or mitochondrial DNA (via any one of four or five different approaches) is a very viable near term goal. All of the necessary component of such a treatment have been demonstrated in animals and human cells in the laboratory over the past decade, leaving just the painfully slow regulatory and development process.
However, when I put myself in place of people actually being harmed by this, I think it totally makes sense.
And this process you (and I) are afraid of...This is not the beginning. It has begun since we started to vaccinate people.
But where does this stop? Replace a gene -> replace mitochondria -> replace a whole chromosome -> replace the sperm/egg -> replace the whole child. We've come back to the real world, i.e. adoption.
However if this becomes widespread, we should be fighting to preserve diversity of benign genes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
Is a good read, also the movie Gattaca (obviously fiction, but raises some interesting questions).
I think there is a parallel to geo-engineering. It sounds like it'll lead someplace troublesome. people can't be trusted with it. OTOH, we have international conferences where they're trying to reach some sort of decisions about how much carbon there should be in the atmosphere. Maybe they'll be deciding how warm it should be, or how much rain europe should be getting.
Once we have the ability to influence these things we are geo-engineers, eugenicists, etc. It's not a choice. Not any more than we chose to take horses, ship rats and house cats to every part of the world.
In fact, if people start inventing words for things that we already have words for it's a good time to start paying attention, likely you're being sold on something.
All of these are called eugenics (though the first is not really focussed on genetic traits); pretending that "eugenics" doesn't carry any baggage because of it's association with Nazi Germany seems pretty disingenuous.
Eugenics is scary, morally complicated, exciting and possibly inevitable. It has some historical associations with fascism and 20th century modernism in general.
The whole thing make people uncomfortable. It's hard to criticize when people just get creeped out by the idea.
Perhaps this is best left to our grandchildren.
Fortunately for me, my mother's GP discussed the matter with her and actually argued against the recommendations of specialists and I turned out perfectly healthy.
This matter only came up in conversation when she mentioned that the GP in question had died and I said I had never liked him as a kid and she pointed out how ironic that was as he saved my life.....
The problem with any kind of structural attempt at removing undesirable traits/children with defects from the population before they are born is the false positive rates are very high. Fortunately for you you're here and healthy. The flip side is that you might not have been healthy and then there would be a significant burden on those around you and society. These are very difficult problems and the harshness and ease with which people talk about them and pass judgement are in stark contrast with what a more informed person would probably conclude.
The wikipedia article is particularly precise when it comes to articulating the problems stemming from slippery slope arguments around this subject.
In the end, Eugenics is a tool that can be used for good and bad, just like every other tool. But it needs very good oversight and the use cases displayed so far are not all positive in my opinion.
Hint: What a disease is and what not, depends a lot on the environment.
If instead you had explained why you disagree with the parent poster and offered some information on how best to define a disease, you most likely would not have been downvoted.
Isn't this an important enough issue to do a study?
Why would you say "there have been problems with all species undergoing this procedure who have been studied" and "humans having this procedure haven't been studied [in depth]" and conclude that the procedure was "not unsafe"?
Who gains from pushing this through??
I think that the animals were inbred was probably important to that decision.
There's also a paragraph where another scientist says:
"Whereas the original techniques were used with only [experiments from] mice, rabbits, lab animals... the big difference here is we also have issue of human embryos and this work has been tested in macaque monkeys in primates. All those were very useful, reassuring… hence why we came to the conclusion that this is not unsafe."
So "there have been problems with all species" is not a fair representation of the information given in the article.
adden.: here's a nice overview of the biochemistry of a mitochondrion, which has been known for at least a decade (and is taught at A-level or early degree level biology): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3350335/figure/F...
Every embryo has 1/2 of genes foreign to mother's mitochondrias - with no gene or combination is guaranteed to be non-foreign. If it doesn't cause problems, why would having all foreign genes suddently cause them?