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Three-Parent Babies: A Slippery Slope?
First, the term “three-parent babies” is a misnomer; it refers to a fertility technique that originally was proposed to deal with dysfunctional mitochondria which are inside most human cells. These mutations can lead to a number of incurable and often fatal diseases that are passed on to the baby. This describes the process:
Scientists remove the nucleus from an egg of the mother-to-be. They then insert it into a donor egg, extracted from a woman who has perfectly healthy mitochondria. (First, they have to strip that healthy egg of its nucleus.)
The egg now contains DNA from both women — but, crucially, it does not contain dysfunctional mitochondria. It’s fertilized, adding the father’s DNA, and then implanted into the mother-to-be, who will (if all goes well) become pregnant.
The mitochondrial DNA contributed by the healthy egg donor amounts to less than 1 percent of all the genetic material in the embryo.
To some people, this process may sound like a harmless and compassionate way to deal with potential birth defects. The controversy escalates, however, based on the work done in a clinic in Kiev, Ukraine, where Valery Zukin, director of the Nadiya Clinic helps infertile women. Dr. Zukin has confirmed that he has used this technique to produce four children for a mother in Kiev. The clinic tried the technique on 21 women and 14 attempts failed (some of those being older women). The other seven women were either pregnant or had babies; they were younger but unable to produce viable embryos on their own.
In February 2016, an expert panel created by the FDA issued a report recommending that clinical trials be established to help women who carry these genetic diseases to prevent their being passed on to their children. Prior to this report, however, in December 2015, Congress, as part of a federal appropriations law, prohibited the FDA from accepting applications for clinical trials for MRT research.
The ethical issues are many:
The US government has treaded carefully because of the novelty of mixing genetic material from three individuals, as opposed to the natural two. Among the many questions the procedure raises: How valuable are the benefits relative to the costs? How would the addition of a third genetic parent impact the identity of the child? Could there be a danger in mixing two women’s DNA in a single egg?
Other issues raised include whether your doctor should tell you that you have a mutated gene; whether the technique might have negative consequences for these children over time. Marcy Darnovsky, head of the Center for Genetics and Society is very concerned. She refers to it as “ . . . an irresponsible kind of human experimentation.” She is also concerned that the procedure opens the door to other practices:
‘What we’re seeing is a fast slide down a very slippery slope toward designer babies,’ Darnovsky says. ‘We could see parents feeling eager to give their children traits like greater strength, needs less sleep. Some people are saying that, ‘Yes, there are genes for IQ and we could have smarter babies.’
The questions about designer babies are periodically discussed, but even before that issue is considered, should we explore the practices of preventing birth defects through these methods?
Should Congress continue to prohibit the FDA’s accepting applications for clinical research?
What are the responsible and ethical approaches to these concerns?
Published in Healthcare
The Boys From Brazil.
The correct answer is to do these experiments in lower species, prove safety, work out the bugs, then do the work in humans. A dozen generations in rats should show if any unexpected mitochondrial deficits come up. Then a dozen generations in guinea pigs or kitties or dogs, then a dozen generations in chimpanzees.
This would be the sane way to proceed, but would take 50 years and my goodness, who has time to wait that long to reap the financial benefits of exploiting couples whose grief over their infertility or their having a lethal mutation to pass on, is so profound that they can’t simply adopt a healthy child who has no family.
I don’t understand why any of this is necessary. But I do understand that it is dangerous.
People don’t turn their backs on technological advances. They just don’t. Implementation could be impeded and slowed, but the process can’t be “un-known” and previous ignorance restored.
As to your first question, um, why would anyone be in favor of allowing birth defects if there’s a way to avoid them? From what ive heard about Downs babies, even here, I get the feeling that some people think we oughta keep them around. Does that include NOT trying to,prevent them from even being conceived that way? Why? Because it might frustrate God’s will? If you believe in an omnipotent deity, surely you can’t believe that’s possible. I mean, it’s one thing to say, hey, he was born (or conceived ) this way and he deserves a chance at life; it’s another to say, let’s make sure some babies are conceived this way, even though we could avoid it.
And let me put in a good word for “designer babies”. I think what’s behind that phrase, which is never used except in a negative way, is the feeling that it is and should remain, an oxymoron, like “designer jeans”. Goshdarn it, jeans are s’posed to be cheap, casual, standard! We don’t need no stinkin’ Oscar de la Renta muckin’ around with ’em! A baby is a product that’s going to have its own individual characteristics, of course, and parents hope they’re going to be able to foster the development of ones they like and quash ones they don’t like.
And the more they like the kid, I would argue: the better for that kid! It’s less likely to suffer parental rejection and disapproval, or even abuse, all of which leave lasting painful scars.
Isn’t every baby a designer baby? It’s just, we wait till the little sprout emerges to graft on our preferences, instead of genetically altering the variety before planting. But what is really so nefarious about the latter?
As for the terrifying spectre of producing “smarter babies”… uh, this is a toughie. At first I’m thinkin’ YAY!! But then I’m thinkin’ of childhood geniuses who either kill themselves, or just never bother with the little interactions and diversions that make our lifespans so pleasant. So we need to make sure we don’t make ’em SO smart that they cant deceive themselves about the futility and stunning brevity of human life. But maybe that can be alleviated in part by engineering for a longer lifespan?
Yes.
I so agree @doctorrobert. We live in a fast food society, where we want, no, must have immediate results. I’m not even sure about the process, but it should be tested first on animals. And I agree about adoption, although I don’t know if black organizations are still insisting that black babies go to black parents. Ridiculous.
Seems to me an adopted baby is a “Four-parent baby” to paraphrase SQ’s title. If that doesn’t worry us, why should this technique?
I’m uncomfortable with this premise on a number of counts, but primarily that we don’t know enough about the long-term repercussions. I don’t like the idea of making these kids and their parents guinea pigs because we were unable or unwilling to do the appropriate testing to determine the possible downsides. Without that data, it’s really a crapshoot.
If we understood biology well enough to avoid the unintended consequences inevitable when tinkering with a complex, reactive system, I’d be all for it. But we don’t. We keep trying to reduce biology down to a set of equations so we can probe the consequences reliably and computationally, like we do nuclear reactions. But we are no where near that. So I suspect that when we eliminate one undesirable trait, we may introduce others, or find out that that undesirable trait was a compromise achieved through millions of years of evolution and the alternative is worse. Look at some of the suffering we’ve inflicted on some dog and cat breeds through selection for human standards of desirability. And there we are selecting for things that occur in nature already. What will happen when gene editing makes anything possible? I agree the genie can’t be put back in the bottle but that doesn’t mean we should embrace every possible avenue with gusto and without a good deal of trepidation.
Yes, I agree. Sure, it sounds wonderful that we can have designer babies that if female are Beyonce or Angelina Jolie and never gain too much weight (a world of size 2 women.) And if male are either Joe Montana’s or Albert Einstein’s.
But how exactly did it come about that the world was blessed with a Michaelangelo or a Leonardo? Or a Vincent VanGogh? Mother Teresa or Nicola Tesla?
Because my objection to 3-parent babies is not social but rather hygienic. What are the consequences, in the third or fourth or Nth generation, of transferring out the nuclei of women carrying mitochondrial disease into an unaffected oocyte?
I don’t know, Hypatia doesn’t know, Susan Quinn doesn’t know and Valery Zukin, director of the Nadiya Clinic, most certainly doesn’t know. There may be delayed effects on future generations relating to enzyme interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm of which we are yet unaware. Who knows!?!?
What I DO know is that the Law of Unintended Consequences has a long and dismal history in the practice of clinical medicine, as well as in every other aspect of human activity. How’s the societal results of AFDC, giving us generations of single-Mom black poverty, strike you? Or of the FDA’s 1992 Food Pyramid, which has given us a generation of Type 2 diabetics?
So I am calling for a few years spent learning about the procedure and its safety before some Ukrainian huckster gets rich doing likely dangerous procedures for which there really is no societal need, while ignorantly creating some new problem(s).
Okay, @susanquinn, @gossamercat, @doctorrobert:
Is the main point of the OP, and of your comments, that this procedure is not ethical because it isn’t, or isn’t yet, safe? Instead of preventing birth defects it may increase them? So it’s really a public health issue?
Then It’s more like the Right to Try issue: it’s better for you, say the powers that be, not to reproduce at all than to take the chance that it won’t turn out well ( even though everybody who breeds takes that chance)–just like it’s better for you to accept imminent death than to try some untested treatment that at worst might increase your suffering, and at best probably won’t have any effect at all.
Whereas, I was responding to the issues Like effect on the “identity of the child” and “opening the door…to designer babies” , like smarter ones.
Leonardo was a freak, a total polymath ( see Isaacson’s bio) and I doubt we could breed for even one other of him , ever.
It occurs to me that what we’d want is, not to breed for excessive intelligence, but to breed fir over-achievers, if there is a gene for that. They should be smarter than average, but mainly they would do great, colossal things because they try so hard and are so determined and they don’t question whether it’s all worth it.
I think it would be useful to consider Matt Ridley’s take on this:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/mitochondrial-donation-is-a-wonderful-opportunity/
He makes a strong argument that it’s not a slippery slope, as this is very different from nuclear DNA substitution, both in difficulty and in result.
As with many things, we cannot be absolutely sure of long-term consequences without trying it. But here, there have been many years of animal trials without ill effect, and really no theoretical reason to expect there would be. (In every generation, the father’s nuclear DNA is “foreign” to the mitochondrial DNA.)
Do you think you can separate the public health issue from the ethical issue? I don’t think you can. I didn’t go into detail, but I think it’s fair to question ethically the rightness of the entire procedure. I find it questionable, at the very least, experimenting on women by transferring the embryo back and forth and mixing the genes of three people when nature intended there to be the genes of two. I’m not asking you to agree, but to say that it doesn’t raises ethical questions because it’s a health issue doesn’t make sense to me.
Thanks so much for the link, @curtnorth. I’m a big fan of Matt Ridley. One paragraph in his article:
She points out that the remote risk of something going wrong in later life for one of the donee children has to be weighed against the vast risk they now run of a much worse outcome. “This is a risk that many of our families would jump at the chance to take, as actually it is not a risk at all, for us it is hope.”
So I wonder if the women who are having difficulty conceiving or maintaining a pregnancy would fall into the same category? They lose the baby early, but it appears that something in the mitochondria keeps them from going to term. It isn’t clear whether a dangerous or fatal disease within the mitochondria are at fault. And does that matter? I don’t know why Congress has prohibited the FDA from issuing applications for clinical trials–whether that is political or scare tactics. Keep in mind that I am simply exploring at that point, and you folks are helping me do that.
Nature intended us to have an infant mortality rate of about 30% and to have an average life span of about 30. Nature intended us to be naked and be eaten by faster animals with sharper teeth, if not killed first by organisms too small to see. Surgery is unnatural, antibiotics and vaccines are unnatural, drinking water that has been treated and eating food that has been cooked is unnatural. I don’t know what your age is Susan, but you have likely defied nature many times to reach your age.
Take that nature!
All true. Not only that but also these innovations were resisted at first and eventually embraced. For better or worse, things like designer babies are probably in our future. Some, if not most, parents-to-be in the future will choose to improve the genetic composition of their offspring if the option is available. It may all go dramatically wrong, in which case people will step back from it. However, it’s hard to imagine that it won’t be tried.
Exactly! “Take that, Nature!”: the battle cry of our species!
“Created half to rise, and half to fall,
Great Lord of all things! Yet a prey to all.
Sole judge of truth, in ceaseless error hurled,
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!”
—-Pope, from An Essay on Man. ( quoted from memory)
I am a cafeteria Catholic, and a lax one at that, but I think the Catholic Church has it right on these issues: we should leave well enough alone. Will parents inform their children that they were genetically modified for traits like intelligence, or will it be kept a secret? And if the kids are told, will that cause them to feel more or less loved?
Love accepts any child that is sent; egotism says that only some children are good enough. Sorry if that sounds judgmental, but as someone who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I am one of the people who will be genetically screened out in the future, and I kind of resent that. Of course, my pro-life parents would never engage in that sort of thing, thank God. :)
I don’t think that applies to this case. No abortions took place. They merely removed the disease.
No words!
No transferable thoughts!
Point taken, @randyweivoda. I appreciate your helping me and others dissect this issue! I’ve certainly had my share of vaccines and poking and prodding, so I’ll have to think over your points.
Oh, well then, as long as we are only creating babies in labs, everything is fine.
Actually, @judithanncampbell, if you were an embryo that could be screened for schizophrenia, you could be born free of it, according to this procedure; the pregnancy would only be altered in that way. At that point, one could say that you wouldn’t be judithann anymore; you might have the name, but you’d be a different person. Your thoughts on that?
Under the guise of “freeing” someone from a potentially disabling condition, one deifies physical/mental perfection and conversely eliminates opportunities for compassion…Please jump in, JaC, didn’t mean to preempt you.
Pre-white civilization, the Pomo Indians here in California commonly lived to be over 95. I am not sure what you are basing the ” infant mortality rate of about 30%” statement on.
And I think Susan is advocating for having a discussion about this complicated procedure, as there are perhaps unintended consequences. It is significantly more complicated than vaccination, for example, as after all, Ed Jenner brought about that process back in the 1700’s, long before anyone even knew humans had DNA or mitochondria.