Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8179z199vo

by 1659447091 • 1 year ago

304 229 1 year ago

foxyv3• 1 year ago

In vivo zygote mitochonrial transplantation. Neat! This is going to add an interesting exception to matrilineal DNA testing in the future.

Another thought, what about three parent households engaging in IVF? Will this be an option to have 3 biological parents regardless of disease? How will we keep records properly? What are the legal consequences? Do mitochondrial parents need to pay child support?

thaumasiotes• 1 year ago

In vivo zygote mitochonrial transplantation. Neat!

Absolutely not. This is in vitro:

> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.

In vivo would make no sense.

Out_of_Characte• 1 year ago

In vivo would make no sense.

It would certainly be one of the more stranger ways to explain the birds and the bees

foxyv3• 1 year ago

Woops, thanks for the correction.

perilunar• 1 year ago

The amount of mitochondrial DNA is tiny though (~0.1%, according to the article), and not particularly unique to any individual, since it is passed down lately unchanged apart from the occasional mutation. There's no point having 3 biological parents unless there's a bad mutation in the mother's mitochondrial DNA.

spauldo3• 1 year ago

I'm not sure there's any point to it. I know a couple poly families and my own situation isn't far off. The kids have a similar relationship with their parents as two-parent kids do. What DNA they happen to have doesn't matter, outside the occasional teenage outburst.

foxyv3• 1 year ago

That is the case in many poly families, and I feel pretty much the same, however some people actually care about stuff like DNA and lineage. Having that as an option for some folks would be pretty cool. For instance, in cases where one person is infertile, they can still donate mitochondria.

wbl• 1 year ago

We already crossed this with donor eggs and surrogacy. As for multiparent households i am aware of recent developments and will not say more.

oc12• 1 year ago

Which recent developments? So you are against people choosing how they want to live?

oc12• 1 year ago

This would be awesome for so many households. We should stop acting like two biological parents is the only way to go.

JLemay• 1 year ago

This is such an incredible breakthrough and a huge win for science and families alike, however its sad that despite decades of work there is still no cure for mitochondrial disease. But the chance to preventing it being passed on is still such a major improvement. Also it’s sad that only the uk is capable of doing this atm bc it was the first country in the world to introduce laws to allow their creation after a vote in Parliament in 2015, while other countries were debating that it would open the doors to genetically-modified "designer" babies

im3w1l• 1 year ago

Cells can exchange mitochondria so in theory it might be possible to flood the body with healthy mitochondria and get them to slowly take over.

yorwba• 1 year ago

I would expect that to activate the immune system. "the unique components of mitochondria, when exposed, reveal their prokaryotic history and are recognized as foreign by innate immune receptors triggering an inflammatory response." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6218307/

Maybe if you suppress the immune system, introduce working mitochondria, and then stop taking the immunosuppressants, any mitochondria that are still outside cells get cleaned up and the ones that got absorbed are shielded and can do their job.

dr_dshiv• 1 year ago

Mitochondrial health is definitely going to be a big theme in the coming years.

type0• 1 year ago

it might be possible to flood the body with healthy mitochondria and get them to slowly take over

it's not possible, these are organelles that are too big to be taken up by your cells, unless you can magically teleport them somehow to each cell

FerretFred• 1 year ago

It is an incredible breakthrough and if it prevents disease then all well and good, but are our Administrative Systems set up to handle such an arrangement?

maxerickson• 1 year ago

Sure. The mitochondrial donor can be treated as a source of tissue and you are all done.

FL33TW00D• 1 year ago

The UK leads in this space as a previous PM had his newborn die of a genetic disease.

Amazing the domino effect.

Sammi2• 1 year ago

David Cameron a conservative ex PM.

He's currently working in the genetic disease space: https://www.paediatrics.ox.ac.uk/news/former-uk-prime-minist...

FollowingTheDao15• 1 year ago

Huge win for science ...big loss for evolution.

I am by no means a callous person, in fact, my therapist tells me I have a problem with too much empathy, and in no way do I wish parents to loose their children so young.

But what I am also not is a eugenicist, which is what this is, eugenics.

"Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population."

Now remember, first they are only preventing the chance of a baby being born with mitochondrial disease. But more importantly, these mitochondrial diseases are still evident in the human population because there is some survival advantage. This is what happens with sickle cell disease [1]. The sacrifices these babies make, dying so young, is a sacrifice for the survival of a genetic population. In the case of mitochondrial diseases, this favors the survival of female babies over male babies, or even the benefit of higher amounts of oxidative stess in the mother to fight off infection.

So by this method, even the female baby will be born without the Mitochondrial mutation. What will this mean for her?

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/mitochondrial-dna-evolu...

"Accordingly, their model revealed that some mutations confer a net replicative advantage over unmutated (wildtype) mtDNA, causing the mutant mtDNA to proliferate within individual organisms."

We know so little and we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are gods and accept our fates. Eugenicists thought they knew what the best genes were to survive, and this is no different.

[1] https://globalhealthnow.org/2024-06/how-sickle-cell-disease-...

hobs• 1 year ago

Generally the reason we think of Eugenicists as "bad guys" is because they've been characterized by being happy to sterilize or kill people to prevent their "subhuman genes" from being passed down to the next generations.

This is different, another step in the erasure of genes that harm humans. This is not a genocide.

It seems like your argument boils down to we should continue to have horrible suffering and early death because diversity of DNA is good and we shouldn't edit out potentially helpful mutations (that also cause horrible suffering) - if we can beat malaria, why would we need sickle cell?

MostlyStable3• 1 year ago

So I think this person is wrong, but the one little nugget in there that is partially right is that I do think it's important that, before we start modifying genomes on a wide scale, we should have a pretty comprehensive database (100's of thousands to millions) of whole-genome sequences (alongside mitochondrial DNA) stored.

perching_aix12• 1 year ago

we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are god

These activities are in no way evidence for people thinking (too?) highly of themselves or "as gods". Just a completely made up accusation.

I also don't see why the scary labels are relevant necessarily. To be afraid of whether this qualifies as eugenics or if you qualify as an eugenicist is sitting backwards on the horse completely. But maybe I just misinterpreted your catious wording and there's no being afraid here - in other comments you outright state you consider this eugenics, for example.

[As] Humanity[, we need to] accept our fates.

No, we really don't. Though if you and people of the same opinion just accept fate, you also accept this research and similar continuing on, so maybe this is not even a point of debate in practice.

foxglacier3• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, the stupid state of public conversation is that you can't talk about these things without couching it in "I'm not a racist but..." type language. People will see the smallest hint of wrongthink and reactionarily conclude you're a Nazi in disguise.

It doesn't matter if something or someone qualifies as eugenics or not. What matters is the outcomes of the actions. FollowingTheDao seems to be concerned about long term consequences on the overall population which may be best served by individuals accepting their babies will die. Or it may not - but it's worth discussing without going into pedantry about the meaning of words.

stefan_2• 1 year ago

By this logic all gene therapy is eugenics.

hombre_fatal• 1 year ago

Presumably all of medicine too since it keeps us from "accepting our fates" and lets us procreate worse genes instead of letting billions of people die sacrificially due to their genes which is a "huge loss for evolution".

Kinda funny to attack TFA by associating it with a naughty word while tracking in such awful ideas as if we're unable to evaluate the ideas ourselves.

FollowingTheDao15• 1 year ago

No, it is only eugenics when it when gene therapy controls the genetic makeup of a child before it is born. Gene therapy for cancer is not eugenics.

tomrod4• 1 year ago

Indeed. My understanding is that eugenics is typically something where the choice is not allowed by the person or, before birth, parents of the person affected by the procedure.

Waterluvian2• 1 year ago

I think your argument is “we’re screwing with nature in big ways and we have a demonstrated history of being so confidently wrong. This is dangerous.” Which I think is a deeply important discussion to be able to comfortably have without the layers of disclaimers.

I think a lot of these biotechs that raise alarms are pretty safe, and the problem is that we’re really bad at explaining in lay terms how it all works, and people naturally assume the worst.

I think it’s also an issue of practicality (and this is where it flirts with being eugenics). What’s the alternative? To tell people not to reproduce if they have known disease prone genes? To make them not reproduce? To tell them they don’t get universal healthcare if they do?

I think mucking about with our building blocks is the least bad option we have.

FollowingTheDao15• 1 year ago

Thanks for not being reactionary. You are in the minority so I figured I would disclaim.

What’s the alternative?

Acceptance. These parents can still reproduce. A female child will most likely be healthy, like the mother. And the male child will not always be born with a mitochondrial disease. People do not realize that father's can also pass mitochondrial genetics to their children. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6639/)

In trying to remove all risk from our lives we are making it inherently risky in other, usually unknown, ways.

All the spiritual practices talk about acceptance, so just pick one.

But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.

throw_m239339• 1 year ago

This is just the beginning of all that. "Designer babies" will obviously be a big business in the future, and one can take that logic VERY far, even for an entire nation where all babies will be mandated to have certain genes or characteristics... or worst, mandated specializations...

Of course, science fictions authors,scientists and philosophers have written plenty of material on the matter and the danger of such societies... and it might blow up in our face one way or another, but nothing aside of our demise can stop scientific progress...

jl6• 1 year ago

Eugenics is any choice that influences the genetic makeup of your descendants in a way that you believe to be desirable. Choosing a tall partner because you want your kids to be tall is eugenics. Eugenics happens every day, in every country. The bad rap comes from historical attempts to apply it coercively. Parents choosing to eliminate their genetic diseases is not the same.

BurningFrog• 1 year ago

Improving the genetic quality of a human population seems like a good cause.

What got"eugenics" in disrepute was the evil things done to people with "bad" traits:

- Killing them

- Forced sterilizing of them

- Forced abortion of their fetuses

That's awful, but because of the means, not because the goal of a healthier population.

imtringued3• 1 year ago

Eugenics has always been a technological problem, not an ideological one.

If there was a cheap and cost effective way to edit your genes as an adult in a 100% safe way, then everyone would be doing it.

The reason why eugenics has a bad reputation is that there are incredibly low tech solutions that require an authoritarian surveillance state and such states have indeed existed and abused their powers in the past. I'm talking about forced sterilisation.

The first problem with these low tech approaches is that their models suck and aren't founded by actual genetics research. E.g. fascists defining their own ethnic group as superior over other ethnic groups.

The second problem is that they didn't just think that they were helping the people born through eugenics avoid diseases or become better people, they were thinking that people with the wrong genes shouldn't procreate or exist at all, because they are a waste of resources and therefore should be killed even if they somehow manage to deal with their complications.

But if we take a step back and start off with a higher level of technology and scientific progress, these concerns turn out to be meaningless.

If there is a gene that objectively causes a disease or harm and it can be identified reliably, then having children with that disease becomes morally questionable. This means some people are prevented from having children that they would otherwise want. However, if there is a technology that allows people to have children without the disease, then suddenly the opposite happens. It becomes a moral imperative to give them access to the treatment so that they can have children. In the extreme limit, no matter how bigoted an eugenicist is, he must always allow even the most "inferior" people (in his eyes) to have children and procreate. The discriminatory part of eugenics collapses into itself as if it never existed.

This then leaves the actual problems with eugenics: lack of genetic diversity and unforeseen consequences of unrestricted gene editing.

The solution to this problem would be to never implement precise genetic editing in the first place. Instead, whole chromosomes should be swapped out. This will increase genetic diversity by allowing a single child to have the combined genes of multiple fathers and mothers.

le-mark• 1 year ago

Clever. So they fertilize an egg from the mother and another egg from a donor with the fathers sperm. Then they yank out the donor/father “pro nuclei” and replace it with the pro nuclei from mother/father egg. Thus the child ends up with the donor’s mitochondria.

9999000009996• 1 year ago

Wouldn't it be significantly easier to just use the donor's egg here ?

Or adopt?

This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children.

This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision.

You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out.

This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.

God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come

gedy• 1 year ago

I doubt problems would be unique to America, many parts Asia are more aggressive with selective births and distorting sex ratios already, I suspect this will be readily embraced and with the much larger populations will be more an impact.

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

I think Fisher's Principle will assert itself in those cases where the balance is disturbed currently. People will see how "excess males" don't have as good outcomes as "scarce females".

morkalork• 1 year ago

It's definitely not unique to America, in fact America is in some ways only catching up to other countries. What is considered legal and ethical in say Mexico or Brazil if you have money is a lot looser than in the USA. IVF clinics happily advertise that they let you do sex selection.

laurent_du• 1 year ago

Why is any of that a bad thing?

HPsquared2• 1 year ago

Mate selection is, consciously or otherwise, based on these considerations already.

inglor_cz4• 1 year ago

"near sighted, edit in some vision"

And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty?

Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line.

"Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted.

It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so.

And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.

9999000009996• 1 year ago

What's a genetic "problem" ?

In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.

Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.

As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.

Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

Or adopt?

Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family.

Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.

stephendause• 1 year ago

There is almost no children available for adoption

This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.

mousethatroared10• 1 year ago

Sick kids need parents too.

And there's plenty of foster kids, like Dave Thomas who was adopted as a foster kid.

So was my friend D. D's adopted parents asked the state of NJ for the kid that needed parents the most. And boy did the state of NJ deliver.

D had a foster home raided by the FBI. Another foster house beat him. He didn't know how to read until grade 5.

Now he has masters in microbiology from a top 20 program, a job as a data scientist and he's making the better part of $200k to take care of his wife and three kids.

As annoying as he is (he is from Jersey), I know he's a guy I can call who will show up to help.

All because a couple of God fearing parents asked NJ for the most messed up kid in the system. For me, D's parents are saints.

It's sick that our society thinks people deserve children instead of the other way around.

daedrdev2• 1 year ago

Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.

The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.

wizzwizz42• 1 year ago

It's not really a "cold" truth: eugenics isn't inherently bad, it's just us humans have an annoying cultural problem where we do horrible horrible things (including, but not limited to, genocide) whenever anyone tries to attempt eugenics. (It might be "human nature" preventing us from ever doing eugenics ethically, but all the evil eugenicists have a shared cultural background, so it's hard to tell.)

From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.

attemptone• 1 year ago

Humanity has discarded natural selection thanks to modern medicine. Gene mutations that would have meant someone didn't survive now can be treated.

There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural".

Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".

mpalmer• 1 year ago

    This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.

So it's like most technology, then.

kenjackson• 1 year ago

In the US would this be considered abortion by pro-life activists?

blargthorwars• 1 year ago

I'm prolife. Perhaps. You're destroying one human in this process.

Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.

hylaride• 1 year ago

Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.

But that (fostering human life) is also not a settled debate if the laws in some states are any indication. But debate is hard in jurisdictions where minority opinion can hold sway (like in Florida where a referendum hit 57% for enshrining a right to abortion).

While I'm resolutely pro-choice and don't consider a fertilized cell to be "human", (before I continue I want to be clear, I 100% support these types of procedures in the article) there is eventually going to be a grey area where debate needs to happen before we hit Gattaca-style dystopian editing.

PS This is not meant to argue against your view per se, which I disagree with but respect. I mean to illustrate how very quickly this gets messy and rational debate flies out the window. But that's the same with anything political in today's climate... :-/

N1ckFG• 1 year ago

Afaik it's a misconception that MRT necessarily involves the destruction of an embryo. The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization, so only one embryo is ever created. The UK trials exclusively used the older pronuclear transfer method, where two embryos are created and the donor's is destroyed, because the journey to full regulatory approval took about a decade and embryos are currently safer to freeze and thaw than eggs. In a hypothetical scenario where MRT became as widely available as IVF, this would not need to be the case for new patients.

sneak• 1 year ago

Being anti-abortion (what you call pro-life) doesn’t also automatically mean that you share the belief that human life and the associated rights thereof begin at the instant of fertilization.

It seems you mean to imply that you are against the destruction of a fertilized viable embryo, but then the rest of your message seems to suggest that it isn’t that important.

perching_aix12• 1 year ago

You're destroying one human in this process.

How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).

bpodgursky2• 1 year ago

Only the extreme fringe is willing to go to bat against IVF. Maybe 10%.

basisword2• 1 year ago

I think it's higher than that. The Catholic Church is against IVF. Although not all its followers will stick to all its teachings a significant number will.

msgodel• 1 year ago

Where I came from (rural and very conservative) everyone is 100% against IVF and frankly, religion aside, I'm not sure it's good. There are certainly ways to abuse it and there's a certain kind of person it's popular with.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

There is a gamut of what is pro-life, pro-lifers themselves don't agree with each other on IVF.

(the same as with pro-choicers and third trimester abortions for example)

MrDrDr• 1 year ago

I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss. Yes there is a donor (egg) and yes the new child will pass on the mitochondria to her children. But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.

gus_massa2• 1 year ago

It's inheritable so it's more than a liver transplant.

I agree that DNA in mitochondria is much smaller than DNA in the nucleus. But in each person there are many mitochondria and they nay have slightly different DNA. And the DNA in mitochondria has a different variation than the DNA in the nucleus. So it's difficult to weight both.

Can we say 2.1 parents? A long time ago I read that most binary classifications are not completely binaries, it's just that 2 options cover almost all the cases. (Are virus alive?) I guess integer classifications also have hidden corner cases.

I also remember from a biology book that in a lab they mixed two blastula(?) of small lizards(?) or something like that. They had different skin color and the baby had patches of both colors. Does that count as 2 or 4 parents?

tialaramex• 1 year ago

Certainly Mother Nature is not obliged to have simple easy to understand binaries where it would be convenient for us and so if we think we see such a binary we should keep in mind that maybe we hallucinated it into existence because it was convenient and that's all.

jungturk• 1 year ago

DNA can migrate between the nucleus and the mitochondria (and vice versa) so its not entirely black & white.

gus_massa2• 1 year ago

I've read about migration from mitochondria to nucleus, but I don't remember in the other direction.

Anyway, it's a very slow procces, IIRC like millions of years. We can ignore it in the human escale.

Also, both DNA use a sligtly different genetic code. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics

For most organisms the "stop codons" are "UAA", "UAG", and "UGA". In vertebrate mitochondria "AGA" and "AGG" are also stop codons, but not "UGA", which codes for tryptophan instead. "AUA" codes for isoleucine in most organisms but for methionine in vertebrate mitochondrial mRNA.

So it's not as easy as cut&paste.

sidewndr46• 1 year ago

While it is a different category that chromosomal DNA, it is still an essential part of mammalian life. None of use would exist in our current forms without mitochondria

pfdietz2• 1 year ago

As I understand it, a human egg has about an equal quantity of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA. The mitochondrial DNA is highly replicated, though (about 100,000 mitochondria, each with ~16600 base pairs of DNA).

burning_hamster2• 1 year ago

I disagree.

I think it would be better to describe this as an ‘organelle’ transplant as it would be easier for people to understand and discuss.

Unlike previous attempts, the donor mitochondria are not transferred into the mother egg. Instead the donor cell is denucleated, and the nucleus from a mother's egg is transferred into the denucleated donor cell. Consequently, there is a wide variety of donor specific material, which may influence the early stages of development and only "wash out" after a number of cell divisions.

But calling it a 3 person baby is unhelpful and misleading as IMO mitochondria DNA is of a different category to chromosomal DNA.

How so? Arguably, mitochondrial genes are much more essential than most nuclear genes.

1. Mutations in any mitochondrial gene often have dire consequences, whereas variants in nuclear genes are much more frequent.

2. Mitochondrial DNA is the most expressed in pretty much any cell by a huge margin. Mitochondria express 13 (IIRC) protein coding genes and two dozen other RNAs. Those 30 odd genes often make up 1-5 % of a cell's whole transcriptome. Only genes coding for ribosomal RNA are more strongly expressed.

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

This will run into objections from those who believe that life begins at conception. I can imagine this procedure being illegal in many jurisdictions.

sigmoid104• 1 year ago

This procedure is already banned in the US, despite the fact that it was pioneered in New York.

tripplyons2• 1 year ago

Couldn't patients have the procedure performed elsewhere as medical tourists? I don't see a viable way to prevent it.

mcintyre1994• 1 year ago

I heard from the news in the UK that it’s currently only allowed in the UK and one other country, which I think might have been Australia.

svieira4• 1 year ago

I am pretty sure most people would not be all right with organ donation a la The Island. The fact that the person is vulnerable and invisible doesn't make it better.

paulryanrogers• 1 year ago

When is it a person?

Are women carrying partial people in their eggs?

If most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant then should we monitor urine and arrange funerals for those lost?

Terr_6• 1 year ago

Meh, those "personhood at conception" [0] folks will always be whining at reality anyway, since what they imagine to be "plain common sense" is actually crazy. To wit:

1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.

2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.

3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.

4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.

_________

[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer

grosswait• 1 year ago

Many families have private ceremonies for miscarriages

throwpoaster11• 1 year ago

So much straw here I'm looking for Rumpelstiltskin.

w10-1• 1 year ago

So mother and father contribute the nucleus, and donor egg has everything else-- which is a lot more than mitochondria.

DNA required by mitochondria are both in the mitochondria and in the nucleus. This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two; or the genetic distance of the donor might matter.

Still TBD whether other problems arise. If they do, I wonder if the affected person has any ability to get medical records of the other subjects, to compare diagnoses or treatments, notwithstanding privacy protections.

throwawaymaths3• 1 year ago

DNA required by mitochondria

DNA that codes for proteins that are required by the mitochondria...

The DNA in the nucleus itself does not make its way to the mitochondria.

This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two

There is plenty of co-evolution between the two. But the idea that the genetic distance between donors doesn't matter is pretty substantiated by the fact that people of two races can have children.

sigmoid104• 1 year ago

people of two races

In modern science, the idea that humans can be separated into "races" genetically is completely debunked. All humans are members of the genus Homo and more specific the species H. sapiens. Two people of different skin color may well be genetically more similar than two people of what you would call the same "race."

amriksohata2• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang2• 1 year ago

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we unbanned you because you promised you wouldn't do this kind of thing, and your account seems to have reverted to the earlier pattern. I'm not just talking about the current comment—I mean the pattern of using HN primarily to comment on political/national/religious/ideological topics. If you would please fix this so we don't have to ban you again, that would be good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35505325

paxcoder• 1 year ago

But this is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44619241

throwaway106382• 1 year ago

Who has to pay child support?

eddie_catflap• 1 year ago

My son Oliver was born with mitochondrial disease and was killed by conditions associated with it at the age of 19. Some of the people mentioned in the report here were involved in his diagnosis and care.

His life deteriorated from that of a normal, fun loving intelligent kid to an isolated bed-bound disabled teenager, fed by total parenteral nutrition and suffering a variety of awful complications. His eventual passing was cruel and brutal. I'm not sure we will ever get over it as a family.

This treatment does now at least offer me a glimmer of grandchildren (my daughter having decided she would not risk children of her own until now). It's a remarkable achievement.

jayski• 1 year ago

I'm very sorry that happened to your son, and that you and your family had to endure it.

whamlastxmas• 1 year ago

Wanted to share same sentiment. Thanks to gp for sharing.

cheema33• 1 year ago

As a parent of teenagers it pained my heart to even read this. I cannot fathom what it is like to endure it and live with it after the fact. I am very sorry for what you experienced and what Oliver experienced.

rendall• 1 year ago

My deepest condolences.

codedokode• 1 year ago

If most diseases are caused by errors in DNA, cannot we make mandatory DNA screening, detect such errors, and warn potential parents not to make children? Eventually this could lead to these diseases simply disappearing, and studying invalid DNA sequences seems to be much cheaper than researching the treatment for the disease.

sorcerer-mar• 1 year ago

The mapping from DNA to health outcome is unbelievably chaotic/high-cardinality, then mixed in with various environmental/social/cultural factors that don’t show up in DNA at all.

Drugs are in fact how we come to understand this chain of causality, piece by piece.

So yeah, what you describe is obviously the dream (hand waving through some ethical considerations) but we just don’t know anywhere close to enough about the biology.

unnamed76ri• 1 year ago

I guess you’ve never met teenagers.

justinc8687• 1 year ago

This might be a silly question: I understand the mitochondria from the mother's egg is unusable due to disease. Why do they need a 3rd person to provide one? Is there a reason they could take one from a father's cell?

opello4• 1 year ago

I assume it's because it would be hard to filter out the mitochondria from the egg and easier to swap the much larger nucleus.

jijijijij• 1 year ago

Mitochondria in human sperm contain no or very little DNA because mtDNA is degraded while sperm cells are maturing, hence they typically do not contribute any genetic material to their offspring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm

So the sperm’s mitochondria are degraded, and I guess, you don’t want somatic cell components for various reasons.

Perenti• 1 year ago

I believe the simple answer (vs complicated truth) is that the donor cell, a fertilized egg, is in a state accepting a not-quite-formed nucleus. There are no male cells that can get into that state AFAIK, possibly excepting pluripotent stem cells that are somehow convinced to undergo ovogenesis.

The truth is of course much more complicated than my limited understanding.

Sammi2• 1 year ago

You only inherit the mitochondria from your mother. The sperm don't contribute mitochondria, they are all in the egg.

mcdeltat• 1 year ago

Fascinating that you can replace the nucleus of a cell and it keeps working fine, given cells are so complex... I wonder what (if any) setup/precautions are required in the cell biology to make it work. And I wonder if there are genetic conditions in which it can't work (e.g. some sort of mismatch between genes and what's already present in the donor cell)?

achillesheels• 1 year ago

I mean click-bait par excellence. No shit it would come from0.1% of someone else. Give me something like three headed baby, you know that enquirer stuff, just class it up. Theres like 10,000 research articles published every year, there’s gotta be some damn interesting speck in this business.

holografix• 1 year ago

Im a father and can maybe understand 0.1% of what this would feel like. I’m so sorry for what you and your family went through.

alex-moon• 1 year ago

I live in Newcastle and it's great to see Newcastle Uni in the news. Bobby McFarland is an international authority on paediatric neurology and of course mitochondrial medicine - he is also a truly lovely guy and intimidatingly smart. Everyone talks about Great Ormond Street but the paediatrics stuff being done at GNCH is world class.

Babies made using three people's DNA are born free of mitochondrial disease

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