Designing Babies with 3-parent DNA
My son has mitochondrial disease. Mitochondria is maternally inherited. My other two children do not have mitochondrial disease which means that my oldest child's mitochondria deficiency/deletion was atypical, sporadic, a random occurrence. The technology that is being considered by the FDA to prevent mitochondrial diseases in embryos would not apply to our situation, so why am I so worked up by this? Yesterday, the FDA concluded a two-day hearing on the science of 3-parent embryos. The process would take the DNA from the egg of the mother and that of the father and insert it into the embryo of a donor egg with healthy mitochondria that has had its nuclear DNA removed. In an interview I heard with Dr. David Prentiss, who spoke out against the technique before the FDA Tuesday, he said that though this has not been attempted in humans, about four years ago, it was accomplished in monkey embryos; thus far, the animals seem to be healthy, though we are unce...