British Bioethics Council Gives OK to Three-Parent Embryo

Thursday, June 14. 2012

British Bioethics Council Gives OK to Three-Parent Embryo

A British ethics committee has recommended going forward with creating human embryos with 3 genetic parents. The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an independent body that considers issues in biotechnology and medicine, has found the genetic engineering technique is ethical and should move forward even though the technique is currently against the law in the United Kingdom.

Why would doctors want to engineer an embryo with the genetic material from 3 people? Because, it will “prevent” the inheritance of mitochondrial disease. Not all of our DNA that we inherit is in the nuclei of the egg and sperm that join at fertilization. In the cytoplasm of our mother’s egg are mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA only from our mother because sperm’s mitochondria are dumped at conception. There are genetic mutations that cause very serious disease found in mtDNA and a woman with a such a mutation cannot help but pass this mutation on to her children.

This is where the three parent embryos come in.

There are two different ways to approach the making of a embryo with 3 genetic parents. In the first method, called pronuclear transfer, doctors would take the nucleus out of an embryo that had a mutation in his or her mtDNA and put it into an embryo whose mtDNA was normal, after removing the nucleus of that embryo of course. (For an illustration of this method click here.) The alternative method, called maternal spindle transfer, would be to remove the nucleus of an egg from a woman with mitochondrial disease, place it into a donor egg with normal mtDNA (after the nucleus of that egg was removed) and then fertilize the engineered egg with sperm. (The Nuffield Council has a description and current state of research for both pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer.) In either technique, the result is an embryo with the nuclear DNA from its mother and father and the mtDNA from another woman.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has determined that either technique would be ethical. The problem is that this kind of genetic engineering would be inherited not just by the child produced, but also by every generation after.

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British Bioethics Council Gives OK to Three-Parent Embryo

Mary Meets Dolly

Thursday, June 14. 2012

British Bioethics Council Gives OK to Three-Parent Embryo

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