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Choose All Your Parents Wisely
Bioethicists have long noted that modern artificial reproduction techniques can involve numbers of people who could lay claim to the title of parent—sperm and egg donors, the surrogate mother, those who raise the child, etc. Now researchers at Newcastle University in England report that they have created embryos with the DNA from three people: a sperm donor, an egg donor, and a second female donor whose contribution to the embryo is a packet of genes that lie outside the egg’s nucleus, called mitchochondria, the structure that is in effect the power plant of a cell.
In this experiment, the nucleus of an abnormal embryo with the DNA from the mother and the father was removed and placed in an egg with only the mitochrondrial DNA remaining. The researchers observed normal embryonic development, though the embryos were destroyed within six days, when they were still balls of undifferentiated cells.
The motivation for the research is to develop techniques that could be used along with in vitro fertilization processes for women whose mitochondrial DNA puts their babies at risk for certain serious genetic diseases.
Pro-life organizations in the UK have expressed their opposition to such research, which took place under the watchful eyes of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has previously asserted its authority over any IVF procedures that go beyond the standard union of sperm and egg, so that fertility doctors would have to fill out an Investigational New Drug Application and file it with the agency.
But this assertion of the FDA’s statutory scope concerning reproductive materials has been challenged by research advocates and has not been fully tested. If the technique described by the Newcastle scientists is adopted by their American counterparts it could provide the occasion for such a test of FDA authority.
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