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posted by Cactus on Friday February 28 2014, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Friday February 28 2014, @02:59PM

    by Open4D (371) on Friday February 28 2014, @02:59PM (#8523) Journal

    Good, thoughtful post, thanks

     

    Personally I am divided on this. I want to see the human genome improved. Given our very unnatural existence full of safety laws, modern medicine, etc... we may very well NEED to artificially manipulate our genes to avoid serious problems with future generations where everyone is loaded with genetic diseases or maybe just an Idiocracy type senario. Survival of the fittest just doesn't mean for us what it once did.

    The example I normally give for this is: ... myself. I have fairly severe hyperopia [wikipedia.org], so I need to wear spectacles all the time. If I'd been born before spectacles were invented (or were available to the masses), I may not have survived childhood. I would certainly have had a lower chance of reproducing. If this condition is even slightly influenced by genes, the invention of spectacles has worsened the human gene pool, and will continue to do so. It is currently a small price to pay, but the price will keep getting bigger from one generation to the next, accelerating as medical science creates more and more workarounds for problems that would previously have been subject to selection pressures. We are lucky that we have genetic engineering available to us to counteract this effect.

     

    I am a human being, a person. I think the other humans I see are people too (can't really prove it). I don't know why we are people, not just complicated chemical machines that act as people. I don't think any other human being knows either. That makes me disturbed by the idea that anyone thinks they know enough to define something/one as non-person thus ok to destroy. Even if it is just a cluster of cells.

    This is a good point, and it's why I don't condemn people who wish to criminallize abortion, yet I do condemn those who try to diminish access to contraception.

    Maybe if the mind-body problem [wikipedia.org], for one thing, were ever to be solved, then I'd be willing to promise a religious person that their objections to abortion and/or embryo use were wrong.

    As it is at the moment, I'm confident their objections are wrong, far beyond any level of doubt that should prevent society acting as such. (Just as I am confident that the cremation of dead bodies is not unethical.) But I still have to respect these people's views. I'm just glad they are not in the democratic majority in my country (for now).

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