On February 3rd, 2015, Great Britain passed a law to legalize mitochondrial DNA modification, thus allowing “three-person babies” or “three-person embryos”. Mitochondrial diseases strike many in the UK, and generally are fatal or reduce the life of a child significantly. Symptoms of a mitochondrial disease include seizures, diabetes, muscle atrophy, and general neurological problems. This new law allows doctors to replace the nucleus from an egg that has mitochondrial mutations with a nucleus from a healthy egg donor. This gives hopes to mothers with genetic mitochondrial disease to have healthy children.
The legislation of a “three-person embryo” has stirred up a lot of controversy. Many people are excited about the possibility of eliminating mitochondrial diseases and reducing death in children. However, others are worried that allowing modification of mitochondrial DNA would be a slippery slope to allowing nuclear DNA modification. This would open the door to modifying phenotype, physique, characteristics, and possibly personality type. Many think that this would be completely immoral and lead to a lot of societal problems, such as decreasing genetic variation and increasing the gap between the rich and the poor.
I personally am for mitochondrial DNA modification. I think anything that can help cure diseases and increase the lifespan of children is something that we should continue to invest in. However, I definitely understand why people are worried about this and how this could potentially lead to other things. I recently watched the movie Gattaca, which is a futuristic utopian movie created to highlight the dangers of normalizing genetic modification in humans. In this movie, parents are allowed to pick the genotype and phenotype of their children. Because of this, one’s position in society is based off of his genetics. I really enjoyed this movie, and I can see a lot of relations between Gattaca and the “three-person babies”. I’ll insert the trailer below:
To look at the KQED article, click here!
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