While the Canadians have taken the legal route to claiming that a child can have three "parents," British scientists are taking it a step further. Researchers at Newcastle University have now created an embryo (a.k.a. human being) that contains the DNA from three separate parents:
They experimented on 10 severely abnormal embryos left over from traditional fertility treatment.
Within hours of their creation, the nucleus, containing DNA from the mother and father, was removed from the embryo, and implanted into a donor egg whose DNA had been largely removed.
The only genetic information remaining from the donor egg was the tiny bit that controls production of mitochondria - around 16,000 of the 3billion component parts that make up the human genome.
The embryos then began to develop normally, but were destroyed within six days.
This all done, of course, in hopes of preventing diseases caused by genetic defects (fatal liver failure, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, etc.). However, the notion that this takes us one step closer to assembly-line human beings seems to be lost in the hard-charge toward technological advancement. Also lost is the fact that this search for a cure for disease in human beings involves killing human beings.
The cure is deadlier than the disease.
Comments (7)
Bridges, you appear to have made a slight misunderstanding - this isn't an embryo-destructive procedure:
1. Get an egg from a healthy doner.
2. Get an egg from the carrier women.
3. Get sperm from the carrier's partner.
4. Fertilise egg two with sperm. You now have an embryo. Its not ready yet, because its still got the disease.
5. Extract the nucleus from the healthy egg. No ethical issue here - its an egg, not an embryo.
6. Extract the nucleus from the one-cell, freshly-fertilised embryo. There is nothing important in the rest of the cell - its that nucleus, with its unique genetic contents, that must be preserved to keep in the ethical clear.
7. Insert the nucleus into the empty egg.
8. You now have one healthy (hopefully) embryo, ready for implantation. No embryos destroyed, if it works.
February 8, 2008 4:55 AM | Comment Permalink
Raven,
As the article says:
The research itself is destructive, and already has been to these 10 human beings.
February 8, 2008 10:15 AM | Comment Permalink
For a species who spontaneously aborts 5 of every 6 eggs that is fertilised before the woman knows she is pregnant, I cannot bring myself to feel that this is murder; if we did not conduct research on embryos and with stem cells, many people you know now would not be alive. Would you trade the life of your wife, your huband, your own child, for the sake of such research NOT being conducted?
Honestly, there are too many narrow-minded bigots in the world today. A ball of cells without a brain that thinks, a nerve cord that transmits information, or nerve cells that feel pain, is NOT the same as a thinking, feeling, crying infant.
-Kim McM., Ph.D.
February 8, 2008 1:52 PM | Comment Permalink
Oh, if thats what you mean, Jared - yes, the research destroyed embryos. But that was nothing to do with the procedure itsself - that was merely a legal requirement, as there was no approval for implanting the embryos created. If the law were ignored or approval somehow granted, there is no reason the embryos couldn't be implanted - as is the eventual objective. They were developing normally, and implantation is a commonplace procedure.
Obviously, I would like to see the techinque perfected in animals before any human babies are born from it - the embryos looked fine, but there might have been damage that doesn't show immediatly.
Also, Kim makes a very good point. Though im not sure at all about that statistic - it must be a very hard one to measure - there is no doubt that a great many fertilised eggs fail to develop.
February 9, 2008 10:28 AM | Comment Permalink
I have mentioned this on my own blog, along with the FRC's stance on the matter. There is a blogger by the name of Lifeethics who I believe would have some interesting thoughts to contribute.
February 10, 2008 5:54 PM | Comment Permalink
How cruel to call me a ball of cells without a brain that thinks, a nerve cord that transmits information, or nerve cells that feel pain. I was that ball of cells then I grew into the beautiful creature of God that I am today. And a narrow-minded bigot. I am really offended by that remark. You need to go to www.afterabortion.org
February 11, 2008 3:12 PM | Comment Permalink
Pat: In this limited medium of text, I cannot make the gagging gesture that I feel is the appropriately immature response to that excuse for an argument.
Would you like to buy a diamond? Only $10. Oh, its just a lump of coal right now, but I assure you it has the potential to be a diamond one day. By your 'logic' that makes it a diamond right now.
Just because something is offensive doesn't make it wrong.
February 12, 2008 7:01 PM | Comment Permalink