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Posted on 03/04/2014 11:56:48 AM PST by lbryce
Making Babies with 3 Genetic Parents Gets FDA Hearing A reproductive technology that taps three parents’ DNA as a way to eliminate hereditary diseases could reach clinical trials if the Food and Drug Administration gives the go-ahead.
Reproductive technologies that marry DNA from three individuals will receive a trial in the court of public opinion this week. Such technologies may hold promise for averting certain genetically inherited diseases passed down via mutations to mitochondria, the cell’s battery pack.
Scientists have already had successes with this type of reproductive approach in monkeys and in human embryos, and are now eager to launch human clinical trials. First, however, they must get the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which will convene a public hearing before an advisory committee on February 25.
The technology, called oocyte modification (but sometimes nicknamed “three-parent IVF”), involves scooping out potentially mutated mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a woman’s egg and replacing it with the mtDNA of an unaffected donor woman. The process is designed to prevent the transmission of some debilitating inherited mitochondrial diseases, which can result in vision loss, seizures and other maladies. Such inherited diseases, often unfortunately known by acronyms for complex medical names that include LHON, for Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, along with MELAS, MERRF and NARP, occur in about one in every 5,000 live births and are incurable.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
And yet, science will forge ahead confronting the exceedingly complex dynamics of which becomes exponentially herculean in its effort to unravel the secrets to its very own seeming omnipotence, based on what it has up until now accomplished for humanity to overwhelmingly ambition and success.
The law of diminishing returns may yet bring science to its knees but it is the very ideology of science of what man can conceive he will achieve that provides the impetus for the belief that there are no limits, science can, will conquer all but one in which may very well be its very undoing.
In a Cosmos of that which was brought forth by a Supreme Being,it is inevitable that science in practical terms will eventually catch up with its very own self-deluding ambitions in reaching the point in which it can go no further as demonstrated by the proverbial irresistible force paradox, in which it will get to validate its very own ideology of no limitations as fallacy.
I wonder, we already have male and female. will these babies be the new middle sex? Will they have extra ears or eyes?
No.
Serious question:
Setting aside for a moment the moral and ethical and religious issues of in-vitro fertilization from 3rd-party parents, how is this different, morally, than giving a person an aspirin to modify a headache?
Eugenics on the way to a clinic near you. Designer babies for the ultra rich.
This is not a serious question.
First you say to set aside the moral and then you say how is this different morally?
I didn’t realize that taking an aspirin modified your DNA and created new life.
Think you need to come up with a better argument than this.
How is the genetic aspect in and of itself different?
I see moral, ethical, and religious issues with in-vitro fertilization from 3rd parties, in and of itself.
I’m looking for additional issues having to do with the DNA aspect in and of itself. Setting aside, for the sake of analysis, the 3rd party conception issues.
And failures will be thrown in the trash. Thousands of failures. Until one day, they declare “success!” and get on the front page of every paper in the country.
Of course they will feel nothing is wrong with creating thousands of little humans, and destroying them.
Of course, feminazis and other mentally deficient individuals will applaud this.
Link to the full-text Free Republic thread.
Why stop at three?
Why stop at humans? Why not combine people with humans with fish genetics so they can grow gills. or birds so they can grow wings??
HOW NUTTY CAN WE GET?????
I bet the real purpose is so two gay people can contribute to creation of a child.
Setting aside for a moment the moral and ethical and religious issues of in-vitro fertilization from 3rd-party parents, how is this different, morally, than giving a person an aspirin to modify a headache?
This is more like a kidney or liver transplant, except it's at the cellular level.
And mitochondria are special as they appear to exist as a kind of separate organism living inside cells. They have their own DNA apart from the DNA inside the cell nucleus. Mitochondria could be endosymbionts living inside our cells. They might be related to the SAR11 clade of bacteria.
The scene in Alien Resurrection comes to mind when Ripley finds her predecessors.
Lyrics from In The Year 2525 by Zager & Evans come to mind: “You’ll pick your son, pick your daughter, too, from the bottom of a long glass tube....”
“As it was in the days of Noah...”
Oh My God! I wanted to delve into this subject, others on this issue but it was beginning to look like some thesis. Even as we speak there are innumerable chimerical human/animal fetuses created by science destroyed within days of “conception” in Japanese laboratories. They are destroyed because it is illegal to create human chimeras with animal DNA so they get destroyed to avoid violating the law.
Rather prophetic except the date is about five centuries off.
The single one that was alive, conscious begging Ripley’s very far off genetic clone to “Please kill me”. (which she did by flame thrower.)
Oh, please. Not.... as..... hideous... (as the Minnesota Monster.)
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