In the Fast Lane: Genetic Engineering Speeds up
From St Mary’s University, Twickenham:
Interim Director of The Centre for Bioethics and Emerging Technology (CBET) at St Mary’s University, Twickenham Dr Trevor Stammers writes on developments in three parent IVF.
Last month saw two major steps in the inevitable progress of genetic engineering with or without any ethical framework. On 27th September, the birth in Mexico of the world’s first “three parent baby” was announced in the New Scientist. The picture of the infant being held in the arms of Prof John Zhang, the geneticist who pioneered the technique, was in every major newspaper the next day, but details of the events leading up to the birth were quite sketchy and still are. As Prof Zhang himself seemed keen to emphasise, though two of the baby’s genetic parents were a Muslim couple from Jordan (the identity of the egg donor was not revealed), the mitochondrial manipulation and birth were carried out by a US team in Mexico because “there are no rules” there. Rules might have facilitated further details being revealed as a prerequisite for permission to carry out the procedure.
The rules in the UK do permit three parent IVF to be carried out here by a technique called pronuclear transfer – but the Muslim couple in the Mexico case refused this method as it involves the destruction of early embryos. The US team therefore use an alternative method of using a donor egg containing healthy mitochondria which had its nucleus replaced by the nucleus of an egg from the mother who is the carrier of the mitochondrial disease and fertilising this egg – or to be accurate, eggs as five embryos were created only one of which developed normally. We are not told of the fate of the other four embryos but presumably they were discarded.
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