
A girl with three biological parents - ColinWright
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28986843
======
fasteo
I did not want to comment in this thread as I am heavily biased and my opinion
cannot be very objective, but let me just try to clarify some facts:

About me: I do have a mitochondrial disease. In some of my cells, my
mitochondrial DNA is not complete. If you think about it as a circle, about
one third of that circle is missing. It is called a "heteroplasmic single
deletion mtDNA mutation".

1\. The mitochondrial DNA, much like the nuclear DNA, is a blueprint for
building bits and pieces of our body.

2\. The mitochondrial DNA encodes parts that are necessary to build the
electron transport chain, i.e., to derive energy from food. In the car
analogy, it encodes parts of the core engine (spark, combustion chamber, etc);
the last step in the whole metabolic process.

3\. The mitochondrial DNA does not encode anything outside of the electron
transport chain. So, no blue eyes, no blonde, no smart. Nada.

4\. This law will allow some kids to have a normal metabolism and a normal
life. Nothing more. Nothing less.

5\. I am well aware that this will open lots of possibilities for future
genetic manipulation, but bear in mind that mtDNA is much more simpler than
nuclear DNA and they are two distinct entities, so this law has no application
in the field of traditional (nuclear) genetic manipulation.

Hope this helps.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _4\. This law will allow some kids to have a normal metabolism and a normal
> life. Nothing more. Nothing less._ //

I don't get it. Of course on a personal level we have a biological drive, like
a hunger, to have children. But on a group level I don't understand why we
find it necessary to satisfy that need?

The problem of children with mitochondrial problems being born, as in
Bernardi's case in the article, could seemingly be solved by her having had a
test to determine if she had mitochondrial disease (ie she would, in the
future, qualify for this cytoplasmic transfer treatment) and then her not
having biological children of her own. That would also rule out the potential
for unknown complications later

To me our current population seems barely sustainable and we already have
plenty of orphans in need of families to care for them. It doesn't add up.

Now, I'm sure if I were in the situation of this enabling me to have a
biological family then I'd want it, that seems entirely natural. But
objectively how does that benefit my community, country, the world?

~~~
icebraining
Two questions:

(1) is it fair to prohibit someone from having one biological child, while
others can have five or six, just because she got unlucky in the genetic
lottery, assuming she can afford the procedure?

(2) assuming legalization, is the number of children born from parents with
this problem really going to have a significant impact in the worldwide
population levels? Isn't it like stopping bathing to save water while you
continue to water your lawn every day?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Selection of those who are allowed to be most fecund seems to me like a
natural extension of neo-darwinism. We've fallen in to a position where the
human race has engineered in - by social and technical changes - the ability
for those with low morals and low intelligence and low natural survivability
to survive and reproduce. It's not like we've been neutral, we're already
currently acting to alter the survivability of different traits in humans.

Luck doesn't seem to have a scientific basis. No one chose for the person to
have an innate biological inability to produce healthy offspring whilst
another person does have that ability [to a greater extent]. _How_ is it not
fair? Clearly being unfair is allowed as you said "assuming she can afford
it", why should financial ability trump biological suitability? That doesn't
seem fair nor sensible.

Will children born from parents who are otherwise unable to reproduce, due to
their innate biology, contribute to global population increase over the long
term? Well, yes, if we allow it to. Or as is suggested here, we choose it.

Use your shower water to water your lawn, make sure you're washing without
chemicals that are going to cause a detrimental impact on flora, waterlife,
groundwater and such.

To use your analogy I'd say choosing to enable the continued acceleration of
global population increase is like legislating to guarantee the use of lawn
sprinklers when there's a shortage of drinking water. Your analogy is twisted
as without allowing this procedure to take place we will still have more
people than we need to continue the human race [of course if we need more
people in the future for colonisation of other planets, or whatever, then the
argument may well change].

~~~
icebraining
_Luck doesn 't seem to have a scientific basis. No one chose for the person to
have an innate biological inability to produce healthy offspring whilst
another person does have that ability [to a greater extent]. How is it not
fair?_

That she has an inability is not fair nor unfair; it simply is. That you chose
to criminalize her decision to have children via this procedure is a choice,
and in my opinion, it's unfair since it discriminates people and for no good
reason.

I'm a fat, lazy slob, and I'm allowed to have children, and she isn't? That's
simply wrong.

 _Clearly being unfair is allowed as you said "assuming she can afford it",
why should financial ability trump biological suitability? That doesn't seem
fair nor sensible._

Who says it should trump? As far as I'm concerned neither should be restricted
from having children. You're the only one arguing for restrictions.

The idea of financial ability was merely to say that my position doesn't
require others to pay for it.

 _Use your shower water to water your lawn, make sure you 're washing without
chemicals that are going to cause a detrimental impact on flora, waterlife,
groundwater and such._

What "chemicals"? It's just a child like any other. We have no reason to
believe it's more harmful than mine or yours. If she should prevented from
having them, on what grounds shouldn't we prevented everyone else?

 _To use your analogy I 'd say choosing to enable_

Ah, but that's the thing. You view this as "choosing to enable". But nobody is
asking you to enable anything; just to not throw people who decide to have the
procedure done in prison (or fining them or whatever).

------
reqres
Perhaps an expert could weigh in here, because I don't really understand the
controversy.

The "third parent" provides mitochondria which, by my understanding, doesn't
affect the genetic makeup of the baby. In other words, the parents' genes
which form the nucleus are intact and unmodified. Isn't this more akin to
receiving an organ transplant than genetic manipulation/selection? Or am I
missing the point here.

~~~
jebus989
The mitochondria has a genome (mtDNA). Not my area but I think while we
initially thought it was a fossil of the mito's prokaryotic history and we'd
subsumed all the good stuff, there are genes there that may be of interest for
exploring ageing and metabolic disorders. It's also quite interesting
genetically, as only passed down the maternal line, so can be traced back to a
single "mitochondrial eve" (MRCA). This brings up some neat ideas in selfish
gene theory wrt battle of the sexes etc.

~~~
geographomics
As a point of interest, there have been some rare cases of mitochondria being
passed down paternally, most likely due to incomplete destruction in the
embryo.

------
iopq
You have to wonder how far people are willing to go to declare things defects.
At first it's just serious diseases. But then people will want their children
to have correct color vision and other nice things.

However, on the other hand, this could actually be a good direction to move
in. We can not only eliminate genetic diseases, but also genes that predispose
us to other common diseases like cancer.

~~~
blueskin_
>At first it's just serious diseases. But then people will want their children
to have correct color vision and other nice things.

...and they should. Nobody deserves a suboptimal quality of life due to
genetics.

~~~
jychang
But then we go full GATTACA.

~~~
Filligree
You don't like that outcome?

Meh. Neither does anyone else, and it won't happen by itself.

If GATTACA was the cost of everyone being healthy, I might take it, but it
won't be. We get the world we want, by and large.

~~~
philbarr
> We get the world we want, by and large.

Hmm, not sure about that. The rich get the world they want, by and large.

------
pbhjpbhj
On a narrow view why have Dr Morrow's concerns been rejected if because his
studies include lots of species but not humans. If, as the article says, there
has been "a lack of funding" to do studies on the children who have survived
following cytoplasmic transfer?

Isn't this an important enough issue to do a study?

Why would you say "there have been problems with all species undergoing this
procedure who have been studied" and "humans having this procedure haven't
been studied [in depth]" and conclude that the procedure was "not unsafe"?

Who gains from pushing this through??

~~~
maxerickson
It says _The HFEA 's scientific reviews dismissed Morrow's findings as not
relevant to humans because they were done on inbred animals._

I think that the animals were inbred was probably important to that decision.

There's also a paragraph where another scientist says:

 _" Whereas the original techniques were used with only [experiments from]
mice, rabbits, lab animals... the big difference here is we also have issue of
human embryos and this work has been tested in macaque monkeys in primates.
All those were very useful, reassuring… hence why we came to the conclusion
that this is not unsafe." _

So "there have been problems with all species" is not a fair representation of
the information given in the article.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Agreed with your last sentence, I clearly skimmed over too fast - but that
doesn't alter the conclusion for me; surely you'd want to actually look at the
human subjects (at least) that resulted from this procedure in depth before
concluding that it's not unsafe?

~~~
maxerickson
I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. As it is, "not unsafe" is a
pretty soft statement to make, it isn't a declaration that there will be zero
problems, it just reveals a certain amount of confidence that the procedure
will be successful in humans. Perhaps they could have found a better way of
phrasing it, but I don't see it as intentionally misleading.

------
iamleppert
Just imagine that mitochondria are an API to a power system and the nucleus is
the control system. Sometimes it works out that a foreign mitochondrial
component (i.e. 3rd party) works well, or maybe there are even whole classes
that work well. But we just don't know. Maybe they are directly swappable, but
since we don't even understand all the processes that go on and what
communication (exactly) takes place we can't say for sure, we just have to go
on primitive black-box cohort studies.

~~~
jebus989
I'd say you're massively selling current knowledge short. Of course in biology
you can always go a level deeper and say "but how _exactly_... " however
there's been a lot of research on mitochondria and there are entire centres
that study it. In comparison to complex eukaryotic cells, the mitochondria
have been see as relatively low-hanging fruit in terms of systems-level
modelling (e.g.
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6140/1567](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6140/1567))
due to their simplicity as a regressed prokaryote with a short circular
genome.

adden.: here's a nice overview of the biochemistry of a mitochondrion, which
has been known for at least a decade (and is taught at A-level or early degree
level biology):
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3350335/figure/F...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3350335/figure/F3/)

