The Food and Drug Administration this week began considering mitochondrial manipulation technology. The procedure, which thus far has been performed successfully in monkeys and could be a dramatic advancement to help infertile couples have their own babies, involves replacing defective mitochondria in one woman’s egg with healthy mitochondria from another woman’s eggs.
Opponents of the procedure, led by the Berkeley, California-based Center for Genetics and Society–widely known for its ultra-conservative rejection of human gene therapy or genetic tinkering–argue that any genetic modification of embryos should be verboten because it crosses what CGS claims is a “strong and long-standing international consensus” against such procedures, although the evidence in support of that hyperbolic position is questionable.
“Otherwise, we risk venturing into human experimentation and high-tech eugenics,” wrote Marcy Darnovsky, CGS executive director, in a New York Times op-ed earlier this week. She refers to the procedure as “three-person embryo fertilization” because it involves combining the genetic material of three people to make a baby free of certain defects, which she writes “could lead to the creation of designer babies.”
There are legitimate safety-based concerns about the procedure, which are among the issues being considered by the FDA. But according to Slate, echoing the views of more moderate experts, groups like CGS present a distorted picture of a procedure that is both safe and does not involve any significant manipulation of the germline–our genetic material passed along from generation to generation.
When a woman’s eggs have severe mitochondrial abnormalities, they can have many miscarriages, stillborn children, or extremely sick babies who are unlikely to survive past early childhood. Fixing this huge amount of suffering for both mother and child seems like a far cry from creating “designer babies,” and paramount to any hyped-up concern about a slippery slope.
Nita A. Farahany, a law professor at Duke University and a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, says that there is a big difference between replacing defective mitochondria and making sure all babies are blue-eyed and blonde–the designer baby scare that Darnovsky invokes. The overwhelming majority of the genome, the traits that are passed on from parent to child, are in the nuclear DNA, not in the mitochondrial DNA.
As Slate writer Jessica Grose notes, despite the extremist views represented by Darnovsky, “We’re extremely far from a world in which we could—or would want to—manipulate embryos so that they have a variety of “perfect” traits, like our babies were made at the Build-a-Bear workshop.”
Read full original article: “Designer Babies” Aren’t Coming. The New York Times Is Just Trying to Scare You.
