Genetic disruption of human beings: creating “three parent IVF” babies
by Margaret Somerville, MercatorNet:
Nothing is too dangerous or transgressive for rep tech.
“Disruption” is a fashionable concept that’s been in the news for some time now, to such an extent that the word is being criticized as “Silicon Valley jargon”. Award winning journalist and Political Editor of The Guardian Australia, Katharine Murphy, would not agree. She has just released her book On Disruption, which looks at how technologies, such as the Internet, have radically changed our professional and personal lives.
Now we are faced with unprecedented 21st century reproductive technologies which can be used to change the genetic essence of ourselves (our DNA) when we are embryos and in such a way that the changes will be passed on to our future descendants. Should we do this?
In other words, is it ethical to disrupt our modern-human genetic heritage which has evolved naturally over at least the last 200,000 years? That is just one of the ethical issues raised by “three-parent IVF” which has also been in the news, most recently, because the Senate Community Affairs References Committee of Federal Parliament has released a report, dated June 2018, Science of mitochondrial donation and related matters. The report considers calls to change State and Federal Australian laws, which currently prohibit such donation.
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