SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the Kwisatz-Haderach-breeding-program dept.
GungnirSniper writes:
The US Food and Drug Administration is holding hearings to help determine if they should allow oocyte modification of mitochondrial DNA, which could prevent hereditary diseases that cause issues, such as such as seizures and blindness, from being passed on by mothers. In layman's terms, this "three-parent IVF" would allow the mitochondrial DNA of an unaffected woman to replace that of the mother while keeping the main DNA, so the child would still look like the mother and father.
From Scientific American: "Once the mtDNA has been swapped out, the egg could be fertilized in the lab by the father's sperm and the embryo would be implanted back into mom where pregnancy would proceed. The resulting child would be the genetic offspring of the intended mother but would carry healthy mitochondrial genes from the donor."
The New York Times has a shorter version of the story, as well as an opinion column urging ethical and moral consideration of this procedure.
Is this an ethical way to prevent future harm, or the start of a slippery slope to designer babies? Is the creation of designer babies immoral?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by tftp on Friday February 28 2014, @03:50AM
In truth, there *may* indeed be unintended consequences for these changes - just as with any proposed change.
And just as with any change that was proposed and REJECTED. Humanity may have been now on the brink of extinction from plague, leprosy, cholera and other preventable diseases if at some point in alternative history the Church declared that all diseases are holy, sent to us by Gods, and medical treatment is verboten, and penicillin is work of Devil himself.
It's reasonably easy to demonstrate that there is no way to predict that $something_bad does or does not happen if you do or don't do an arbitrary action $A. You only have probabilities. Sure, playing Russian Roulette with a 1911 [wikipedia.org] is probably more risky than eating an apple. That much risk we can and should recognize. On the other end of the range, it may be that Washington Red apples, if eaten for 100 generations, cause infertility and death of civilization. The duty of science is to estimate likely risks for doing $A and for not doing it, as well as the costs (see the AGW theory.)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by glyph on Friday February 28 2014, @08:18AM
On the flip side to your hypothetical... Imagine if humanity was on the brink of extinction from a plague or what have you, and the only people immune were the ones carrying those "undesirable" hereditary traits that we just finished cleansing from the gene pool. Oops.
It occurs to me that Darwin already did the risk/reward analysis, in a manner of speaking. More diversity always leads to better chances of survival.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Open4D on Friday February 28 2014, @03:11PM
I take your point, although I think the story we are discussing proves that it is not an absolute. It's difficult to see how the diversity represented by faulty mitochondrial DNA (and an early death [bbc.com]) could ever realistically be a good thing.
But yes, any treatments like this should be highly focussed, and only reduce genetic diversity where necessary. Perhaps they should seek approaches that work by engineering increased genetic diversity wherever possible? (Different treatments for the same disease or something?)