Nanochick wrote:
] inignoct wrote:
] ] ]] A controversial IVF technique could see babies
] ] ]] being born with three parents, scientists have suggested.
]
] ] ]]
] ] ]] Experts in China say they have created embryos using eggs
]
] ] ]] from two women and sperm from one man...
] ] ]
] ] ]Marie, should this be legal or not?
] ]
] ] i have no problem with this. they're just using a healthy
] ] woman's egg cell as a carrier, right? there shouldn't be
] any
] ] of the donors DNA left to complicate the fertilization.
] ]
] ] it's like, one lady had a cracked mixing bowl, so she
] borrowed
] ] her neighbors bowl in order to mix up the ingredients for
] some
] ] cookies. as long as the neighbors bowl wasn't still caked
] ] with paprika and chili powder from her own cooking, the
] ] cookies should be fine, untainted by her neighbors recipe.
] ]
] ] seems like calling it three-parent is misleading if the
] donor
] ] of the "blank egg" has no genetic effect. does the
] cytoplasm
] ] have more to do with embryonic development than i think it
] ] does? a genetic or mechanical influence?
]
] I am not sure that this should be legal. Seems to me, and it
] states in the article as well, that this is getting a tad too
] close to human cloning for my tastes. Yes, there is genetic
] material found in the cytoplasm of a cell, namely the DNA
] found in the mitochondria. So basically, they are mixing DNA
] from three different adults. The mixing bowl analogy would be
] better suited when there is a surrogate mother involved...in
] that sense, the mixing bowl would be the womb, and nothing
] else.
] This procedure causes an child to be born with three differnt
] kinds of DNA, which could cause problems scientists have never
] even run into. It raises an interesting scientific question
] about what would happen, though. As of now, your nuclear DNA
] is a mix of your parents DNA, while mitochondrial DNA is only
] inherited from your mother. Seems to me, that due to the fact
] that you can only inherit it from your mother, cellular
] machinery may rely on that assumption in some way.
] Either way, its too close to human cloning, which is shady as
] hell:)

hm, ok, i see. that all makes sense. i still don't see the angle regarding human cloning though. i can admit that this is probably not a good technique to be using until we understand the ramifications of creating a child with, effectively, someone elses mitochondrial dna (you seem to indicate it is otherwise normally genetically derived from the parents, just not getting it's moms mitochondrial DNA from the cytoplasm, or possibly getting a little from mom and a little from the donor). still, while it's not a natural fusion of 2 parental DNA sources, it doesn't strike me as anything like cloning... if anything, it's further from it because even less of the resultant DNA came from a single source.

RE: BBC NEWS | Health | Foetus with three parents created