Matt Drudge is going big this morning with a headline about British scientists taking DNA from one man’s sperm and two women’s eggs and creating a designer embryo out of it. This is the science: “They removed nuclei from the sperm and egg of affected couples, leaving behind the mitochondria. The nuclei were put into one of the fertilised eggs left over after other women had IVF treatment. This egg had its nuclei removed – but retained its healthy mitochondria.” Well that was pretty lesbian of them.
designer kids
Now Heather Really Can Have 2 Mommies
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Fitz
UGG. Humans can’t even bio-engineer a head of lettuce without creating problems.
the crustybastard
I look forward to the obligatory preemptive legislation ensuring that gay people will also never be allowed to have children together.
Politicians are NEVER “too busy” to debate and enact anti-gay legislation.
fredo777
i wouldn’t partake even if gays weren’t prohibited from such science. i think frankenbabies are just somewhere we shouldn’t be going.
Mike L.
@fredo777: U know they said things like that of test tube babies not so long ago, such as that they would have no souls among other mean things so stop being a btch.
I always figured that they could do such a thing, I read a report about two female mice having a baby I forgot how they went about doing that but it can happen. It all has to do with science and biology which to a certain extent humans can do great things with.
I do feel as though the religious nuts would go crazy over this and even if this was found to be viable and the babies would have no severe problems with the children they would still try and stop it.
Lol it would more than likely cost thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to do this though, so adoption or surrogacy are much more affordable option.
Alexandria
Even as a child (yes, some freakish mutation between my teacher parents ended up with me as a science nerd), way before I knew anything about the LGBT community, I’ve been looking forward to them figuring out how to do this because it seemed so logical–it seems like it should be a lot easier than somatic cell nuclear transfer (how they did Dolly).
A lot of the problems with SCNT have to do with how you’re taking the nucleus of a somatic cell, a mammary cell or some such, which already has undergone many rounds of division (and potential accidental replication mistakes/mutations as occurs all the time in our bodies), as well as undergone a lot of post-replication modifications on the DNA to (putting it briefly) silence some bits that the specific cell doesn’t need.
Understand that my area of research is in DNA repair and not stem cell-related work like this, but from my probably meager understanding of the issue, using the nucleus from a germ cell (the egg) should go a long way towards skipping some of the problems that we see in conjunction with cloned animals.
And as a scientist, I simply cannot comprehend people’s fear of clones–guess what? They’re not going to sprout machine gun arms and take over the world. (And I thought *I* watched too much science fiction.)
fredo777
@Mike L.: I’m not being a bitch. Test tube babies are not the same as actually scientifically altering sperm or eggs, which my reservations about are not religious in nature but out of concern for the resulting child’s health.
Mike L.
@fredo777: Fine. But will we ever know if it’s never even tested to begin with?
I mean thing of so many medical and scientific things that have been found through having ideas and testing them, if they were too afraid of finding out where would we be? Still stuck in the medieval ages or further back.
fredo777
@Mike L.: Far be it from me to stand in the way of scientific progress, but I personally would never go there.
Mike L.
Ugh! Crap I hate not double checking my posts until after posting them.
Oh well.
I can see where ppl regardless of religious believe or lack there of would not do a 3 person IVF.
I would if it was safe and I had the money (I’d still adopt though, I’m big believer in adoption). But certainly if it wasn’t safe nor I had the money I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that. I would just be good to have the technology for it.
I could already see the Churches going apeshit, completely apeshit of something like that if it did happen, b/c they would have to decide if would children resulting from 3wIVF (three-way invitro fertilization) have souls or go to heaven like they had to for regular IVF children etc.
fredo777
I’m glad that my first comment was hidden after only 4 thumbs down votes. It just cements my views on the stupidity of comment spotlighting or hiding based on votes.