Three People And A Baby
In a bill passed Tuesday, February 24, by the House of Lords, the U.K. has officially become the first country in the world to legalize the creation of human embryos from the DNA of three people, according to BBC News.
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This technique is intended to help mother avoid passing on genetically degenerative diseases to their children. The process involves altering an egg or embryo before it is transferred into a woman, and had previously been forbidden by British law. They are intended to avoid passing on defects in the mother’s mitochondria, which can result in diseases including muscular dystrophy, heart, kidney, liver failure and severe muscle weakness. The methods would likely only be used in approximately a dozen British women every year who have faulty mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell’s nucleus.
The scientists would remove the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother, and insert in into a donor egg from which the donor DNA has been removed. The process can be done before or after fertilization. “This result will be life-changing for many women living with mitochondrial disease, giving them the precious chance to bear unaffected children, removing the condition from a family line and reducing the numbers faced with its devastating effects,” said Robert Meadowcroft, chief executive of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, in a statement.
The decision is not without its outspoken critics, and is already sparking debate. The Center for Genetics and Society, a U.S. based advocacy group, has labeled the decision “a historic mistake” that, they say, will result in turning children into “biological experiments and sell wildly exaggerated hope to women already in a challenging position.”
The process, developed in Newcastle, uses a modified version of in-vitro fertilizaion (IVF) to combine the healthy mitochondria of a donor woman with the DNA of two parents. The first baby could be born as early as 2016.
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