rockin'robin
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Starting next year, children in the U.K. may be born with the DNA of three different people, after a Parliamentary vote earlier today approved a controversial fertility procedure.
The lower chamber of British Parliament, the House of Commons, voted 382-128 today to pass a bill authorizing an in-vitro fertilization technique that would combine two parents’ genetic material with that of a third female donor. The upper chamber, the House of Lords, is expected to take up the issue next month; if they also vote in favor, three-person IVF could become legal by October, making the U.K. the first country in the world to permit it.
The procedure would allow women who carry the genes for mitochondrial disease—a collection of inherited and incurable conditions—to have their own biological children without passing down the risk. Mitochondria, often described as the “power center” of the cell, are the organelles that provide it with energy. They also have 37 genes within them—and when those genes have certain mutations, they can trigger a host of debilitating and sometimes fatal problems, including muscular dystrophy, heart and liver issues, seizures, and diabetes. Worldwide, an estimated one out of every 6,500 children is thought to have some form of mitochondrial disease, which can only be passed down from mother to child (sperm doesn’t play a role).
The procedure, pioneered by a team of researchers at the U.K.’s Newcastle University, can be done a couple different ways. In the first, maternal spindle transfer, the nucleus is taken from a mother’s egg and inserted into the donor egg, which has been cleared of everything but its mitochondria. The resulting egg—which contains nuclear DNA from one woman, mitochondrial DNA from another—is then fertilized with the father’s sperm. In the second method, called pro-nuclear transfer, both the mother’s egg and the donor’s egg are fertilized; the mother’s nuclear DNA is then taken out of her egg and inserted into the donor’s, which has had its own nucleus removed.
"It is not part of what makes us genetically who we are. It doesn’t affect height, eye color, intelligence."
Last week, a group of 40 researchers, bioethicists, and government advisors from around the world penned an open letter to Parliament in support of the procedure, calling it “an international demonstration of how good regulation helps medical science to advance in step with wider society.”
(Read more....)
http://news.yahoo.com/three-people-baby-185550160--politics.html
The lower chamber of British Parliament, the House of Commons, voted 382-128 today to pass a bill authorizing an in-vitro fertilization technique that would combine two parents’ genetic material with that of a third female donor. The upper chamber, the House of Lords, is expected to take up the issue next month; if they also vote in favor, three-person IVF could become legal by October, making the U.K. the first country in the world to permit it.
The procedure would allow women who carry the genes for mitochondrial disease—a collection of inherited and incurable conditions—to have their own biological children without passing down the risk. Mitochondria, often described as the “power center” of the cell, are the organelles that provide it with energy. They also have 37 genes within them—and when those genes have certain mutations, they can trigger a host of debilitating and sometimes fatal problems, including muscular dystrophy, heart and liver issues, seizures, and diabetes. Worldwide, an estimated one out of every 6,500 children is thought to have some form of mitochondrial disease, which can only be passed down from mother to child (sperm doesn’t play a role).
The procedure, pioneered by a team of researchers at the U.K.’s Newcastle University, can be done a couple different ways. In the first, maternal spindle transfer, the nucleus is taken from a mother’s egg and inserted into the donor egg, which has been cleared of everything but its mitochondria. The resulting egg—which contains nuclear DNA from one woman, mitochondrial DNA from another—is then fertilized with the father’s sperm. In the second method, called pro-nuclear transfer, both the mother’s egg and the donor’s egg are fertilized; the mother’s nuclear DNA is then taken out of her egg and inserted into the donor’s, which has had its own nucleus removed.
"It is not part of what makes us genetically who we are. It doesn’t affect height, eye color, intelligence."
Last week, a group of 40 researchers, bioethicists, and government advisors from around the world penned an open letter to Parliament in support of the procedure, calling it “an international demonstration of how good regulation helps medical science to advance in step with wider society.”
(Read more....)
http://news.yahoo.com/three-people-baby-185550160--politics.html
