by Credit: Newcastle Fertility Center, Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
It is said that a village is needed to educate a child, but under an amazing new IVF technology it can take four people to receive one.
This week, scientists announced that eight healthy babies with the DNA of a “second mother” were born in Great Britain to repair damage in their mitochondrial DNA – a tiny part of the genetic code that supplies the cells.
The process includes the fertilization of an egg and the transplanting of its nuclear DNA into a second -fertilized donation with healthy mitochondria.
Nuclear -Dna is the important part of a person who contains all the information that makes us what we are. The technology is more like changing a defective battery.
In most cases, the baby’s father fertilizes both eggs. However, experts admitted this week that the egg dispenser is occasionally related to the father, so
This means that two men and two women can now be involved in the conception of a child.
Dr. Louise Hyslop, embryologist in the Newcastle Fertility Center, told reporters on Wednesday: “In most cases, it is the partner’s sperm, but for some of the loan donors, the loan donor is related to the male partner. Obviously we cannot use his sperm for these donors.
“We have to use a donor sperm for the donor.”
Give hope of thousands of families
The procedure is undoubtedly a scientific triumph, and Great Britain should be proud to give thousands of families who would otherwise have had no children.
Many children may not have a chance of a life that free from heart and liver failure, blindness, deafness, diabetes, breathing problems or early deaths.
However, it raises ethical questions of how far science is willing to pursue a healthy child.
Does it open the door so that other diseases can be healed by healthier people by splicing in DNA?
Will we be able at some point a superhuman that consists of the best genetic code of the best collective mankind? And what ultimately does that mean for the descent?
“Donors don’t count”
Currently, children who are designed by donated egg or sperm dispensers have legally entitled to know the identity of their donors when they are 18 years old.
However, human fertilization and embryology authority (HFEA) believe that those who donate mitochondria provide less than one percent of the genetics of a child and are therefore not considered a parent.
As such, children have no right to know their identity, although they could not exist without this person.
This feels wrong, as there is also growing evidence that mitochondria are not only the battery of the cell, but also provide other critical functions and even promote individual properties.
The University of Cambridge recently found that genetic variants in the DNA of mitochondria could increase the risk of developing type -2 diabetes and multiple sclerosis as well as the influence of characteristics such as size and lifespan.
The same team also discovered specific mitochondrial lines, especially in Scotland, Wales and Northumberland. So it just feels like saying that the mitochondria of an individual have no relevance for their make-up.
Good match required
The long -term effects on babies born from such a tangle of DNA with several people are also unknown.
Studies have shown that there must be a good agreement between mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA for long -term health.
At the moment the eight born babies were healthy, but problems were shown in animal experiments below when a non -agreement between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA caused cardiovascular and metabolic complications and shortened lifespan.
Scientists have also found that it is difficult to transplant a core without wearing some mutated mitochondrial DNA. Experts have warned that it is likely that at some point a baby will be born by the new technology with sufficient mutated DNA to cause problems.
Nucleus families (transplant)?
Despite the amazing science behind this breakthrough, it will take decades to know whether this technique was really a success.
It is clear that we have entered a new era in which our DNA can be replaced if we want it.
And it may not require the genetic code of other people. A great cooperation between British universities was recently established to synthesize the DNA, which means that genetic code could be created from scratch and inserted as desired in the future.
The genetic processing also shows promising individual gene mutations that cause diseases such as sickle cell diseases, beta-thalassemia and cystic fibrosis.
While the ethics of mitochondrial transfer during the parliamentary debates were worked out before a change in the law in 2015, science changes so quickly that it is probably time to visit the effects of the genetic change of man again.
The traditional core family disappears quickly and very easily, the child can go with two parents in the same way.
