A recent NYT op-ed by Marcy Darnovsky warning about a procedure that uses donor-supplied mitochondria to allow women with mitochondrial diseases to give birth to healthy children has kicked off a new debate about “designer babies”. Nita Farahany, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, emphasizes that using donated mitochondria doesn’t make the donor a “third parent,” as the scare stories would have it:
Embryos that result from these techniques have genetic material contributed from three different individuals, but the mitochondrial donor is not a parent — genetically, or otherwise. When using mitochondria from a donor egg, the resulting egg (which has the nucleus from the intending mother) has 99.9 percent of its coding DNA from the intending mother. The donor provides the energy necessary for the egg to function normally. When the egg is then fertilized by a sperm cell, the resulting embryo carries less than .1 percent of its DNA from the mitochondrial donor.
Ronald Bailey accuses the NYT of “immoral scaremongering”:
The mitochondrial replacement technique is not at all “deeply problematic.” In fact, the FDA panel has finally gotten around to considering a technique that the agency banned after essentially the same procedure was being successfully deployed by team led by fertility researcher Jacques Cohen 13 years ago. Cohen used the technique to help women to give birth to 20 children before the FDA shut down his work in 2001. At a conference some years later, I asked Cohen how the children were faring and he told me that 19 were healthy and one has an autism disorder. As it happens, some research finds a correlation between mitochondrial dysfunction and some cases of autism.
Jessica Grose also dismisses the fears over designer babies and describes what’s at stake for the pregnant women:
When a woman’s eggs have severe mitochondrial abnormalities, they can have many miscarriages, stillborn children, or extremely sick babies who are unlikely to survive past early childhood. “They will suffer immensely because they can’t get the energy” in order for their brains and hearts to grow, says [Nita] Farahany. They can have extreme pain and difficulty breathing. Fixing this huge amount of suffering for both mother and child seems like a far cry from creating “designer babies,” and paramount to any hyped-up concern about a slippery slope.
Although the mitochondrial procedure may not entail the creation of designer babies, Drum figures we’ll get there eventually:
It’s about time we faced up to this, I think. As the technology for this steadily advances, and designer babies become possible, parents are going to get designer babies. If the United States bans it, they’ll go to Switzerland. If Switzerland bans it, they’ll go to China. If China bans it, they’ll go underground. But one way or another, if this technology exists, the demand for it is going to be irresistible.
The Dish 