Very exciting news came out of Britain last week when the House of Commons approved research on a technique that could save hundreds of babies from suffering horrific inherited diseases.
Mitochondria are specialized parts of a cell that take in nutrients and convert them to energy at the cellular level. These are passed on to children by their mothers and contain a miniscule (less than .01 per cent) of a person’s DNA.
Unfortunately, mutations in that DNA can cause a wide of array of problems.
Researchers have been working on a new procedure called mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) that replaces mutated mitochondria with healthy DNA from a donor. That is invariably how it has been reported although it is a tad misleading. In fact, what scientists do is strip the nuclear DNA from a donor’s egg and replace it with a fertilized nucleus from the prospective parents.
Sadly, the mainstream media, even respected papers such as The Globe and Mail, erroneously sensationalized the news as is too often the case. The Globe’s headline was typical: “British vote clears way for world’s first three parent babies.”
Part of the problem is MRT is also widely known as three-person or three-parent in-vitro fertilization so it is easy to see why non-science journalists might go down that road.
But the real problem with this kind of reporting is twofold. First, it is simply not true. Second, it fans the flames of discontent with the anti-science crowd.
Babies born using this technique will derive 100 per cent of their nuclear DNA, the stuff that makes us who we are, from their parents. Once the nucleus of the donor’s egg has been removed, that cell is a mere vessel.
These babies will no more have three parents than I would become two people if I had tiny patch of donated skin grafted on my hand to cover a burn.
Of course, there are those (very vocal) people for whom any kind of minor tinkering with the building blocks of life is tantamount to “playing God” and they were instantly out in force.
It is unfortunate because this development is in no way what the headlines suggest.
More moderate critics point to the “slippery slope” from MRT to “designer babies.” This is also a major exaggeration. As Dr. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the director of its Masters of Bioethics Program, wrote for the Wall Street Journal: “A clear and hard distinction exists. I can describe taking a trip to the grocery store around the corner from my home, or a trip to another galaxy. Both are trips, but the ability to do one by no means allows or suggests I can or will ever do the other.”
Even huge fans of biotechnology, such as me, are uncomfortable with the ethics of messing with nuclear DNA. That is not to say I oppose it outright, but I think we are a long, long way from answering the necessary questions that go along with that kind of genetic manipulation.
MRT, on the other hand, has none of those connotations and we should be very cautious about allowing fear-mongering to prevail when important advances in biotech are on the line.
Approving MRT is something we should also be looking at in Canada.
