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Monkey DNA Swap Paves Way to Engineered Babies

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by Aaron Saenz on August 31st, 2009

Great joke I just heard: How many monkeys does it take to make a baby? Answer: Three. Two for chromosomal DNA, and one for mitochondrial DNA. Ha ha ha… Yeah…maybe it’s only funny to geneticists.

I have two mothers and one father! WTF?

I have two mothers and one father! WTF?

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) were able to produce the first primates with three biological parents. Four macaque monkeys were born through an in vitro fertilization process in which the DNA of two females and one male were combined. Of the two mothers, one provided all the chromosomal DNA while the other only provided mitochondrial DNA. This technique may eventually be developed into a treatment in humans so that women with defects in their mitochondria can have healthy offspring. The successful test also raises concerns about genetically engineered babies because the new monkeys will pass on the genetic alterations to their offspring.

The mitochondria organelle often gets called the power house of the cell because of its role in creating energy releasing molecules. However, it could also be called the ticking time bomb of the cell because as many as 1 in 4000 people develop illnesses due to defects in their mitochondrial DNA. Sometimes these defects can be passed on from a mother who has no outward signs of the condition. Those people with this type of genetic problem have risks for certain kinds of epilepsy, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, deafness and blindness. The work at OHSU demonstrates that a carrier could pass on the 99% of her DNA that is healthy (chromosomal) and use a donor to fill in the missing 1%.

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Designer Babies – Like It Or Not, Here They Come

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by Keith Kleiner on February 25th, 2009

Long before Watson and Crick famously uncovered the structure of DNA in 1953, people envisioned with both horror and hope a day when babies could be custom designed — free of inherited disease, yet equipped with superior genes for good looks, intelligence, athleticism, and more.  Now the beginnings of the day of designer babies have finally come.

designer babies baby

Designer Babies - here they come!

The Fertility Institutes recently stunned the fertility community by being the first company to boldly offer couples the opportunity to screen their embryos not only for diseases and gender, but also for completely benign characteristics such as eye color, hair color, and complexion.  The Fertility Institutes proudly claims this is just the tip of the iceberg, and plans to offer almost any conceivable customization as science makes them available.  Even as couples from across the globe are flocking in droves to pay the company their life’s savings for a custom baby, opponents are vilifying the company for shattering moral and ethical boundaries.  Like it or not, the era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back.

For decades now a technology called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, has enabled In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinics to screen embryos for more than 100 potentially debilitating and often deadly diseases before the embryo is implanted into the mother.  A medical revolution has thus unfolded, enabling literally tens of thousands of couples and their babies to sidestep some of the world’s most terrifying diseases.

Take the case of Cindy and John Whitley.  Their first child died at the age of 9 months from a deadly genetic disorder called spinal muscular atrophy.  Genetic analysis uncovered that the Whitley’s statistically had a 1 in 4 chance of creating a child with spinal muscular atrophy each time they conceived.  Unwilling to risk having another child with the deadly disorder, the Whitley’s used PGD to conceive three children, all healthy.

Yet PGD allows scientists to screen embryos for much more than just genetic diseases, and therein lies the promise – and the peril – of designer babies.

Gender was the first major genetic trait beyond genetic disease to be widely manipulated through PGD.  The Fertility Institutes is a leader in the field, claiming nearly 100% success in providing couples with a baby of a predetermined gender.  Completely healthy and fertile couples from all over the world are coming to The Fertility Institutes everyday to confront the risk, the expense, and the discomfort of  conceiving their baby in a test tube, all for the ability to choose the sex of their baby.

Gender selection is a big business.  Dr. Steinberg, Director at The Fertility Institutes, claims that they are performing on the order of 10 gender selection fertilizations every week, each for a fee of $18,400.  Although In Vitro Fertilizations were originally designed to help parents that were unable to conceive children naturally, Steinberg says that a staggering 70% of their clients have absolutely no difficulty conceiving children, coming to the Institute purely for opportunity to choose the sex of their baby.

Now, in the latest twist in the march towards designer babies, The Fertility Institutes says they will soon be able to offer couples the ability to screen their embryos for eye color, hair color, and complexion.  The Institute cannot change the DNA of the donating couple — if neither the mother nor the father has genes for green eyes, for example, then the Institute cannot give them a baby with green eyes.  Yet within the constraints inherent in the DNA of the donating couple, The Fertility Institute is willing to screen embryos for these traits.  The Fertility Institute wants to offer several other customizations, and many more are sure to be released in the coming years as the science behind screening for them is developed.

In many countries around the world PGD is heavily regulated and designer babies are strictly out of the question.  Yet in a strange paradox, even as the United States is one of the world’s most regulated nations in several areas of medical research and development, PGD is completely legal and unregulated in the United States.  Hence, even as the United States is hindered by regulation in areas such as stem cell research, the country seems poised to be a world leader in the designer baby revolution.

At the moment, The Fertility Institutes carries the mantle as the company at the forefront of this revolution, and as such they are a lightning rod for the praise and adoration, but also the bitter and severe anger, of those on both sides of this great moral debate.

The genie is officially out of the bottle, in fact it probably has been for a long time.  There is no stopping the designer baby revolution.  Even as some countries try to clamp down on it, others will allow it.  Progress, if we call it that, will continue unabated.  A similar phenomenon has unfolded with embryonic stem cell research  in recent years.  Even as the Bush administration almost completely strangled US investment and research in this promising field, other countries invested heavily and advances continued.

A new generation of genetically enhanced designer babies is inevitable in the coming decades.  Yet for those of us that are merely “normal”, do not despair.  Even as we are outmatched by the next generation genetically, a host of new technologies from chip implants to gene therapy may allow us to keep up, allowing us to enhance ourselves in equally transformative ways.  The future will indeed be interesting.

Want to know more? Below are some excellent videos and articles that served as much of the source for this story:

60 Minutes Story Focused on The Fertility Institutes:

60_minutes_designer_babies

The Wall Street Journal: A Baby, Please. Blond, Freckles — Hold the Colic

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Genetically Modified Humans: Children With Three Parents

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by Keith Kleiner on February 2nd, 2009

Nick Lane from New Scientest wrote an interesting article about genetically modified humans that opens as follows:

“CHILDREN with three parents might sound like monstrous chimeras, but they are among us already. In the late 1990s, an American team created the first genetically engineered humans by adding part of the egg of one woman to the egg of another, to treat infertility. When the US Food and Drug Administration got wind of the technique it was promptly banned, though related methods have been used in other countries.”

Although almost all of our DNA resides in the nucleus of our cells, there is a tiny portion of our DNA that resides separately in the mitochondria, and this mitochondrial DNA is passed down only from the mother, not from the father.  It turns out that there are several seriously debilitating diseases that the mother can pass on to her child if she has defective mitochondrial genes, such as Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy and Leigh syndrome.  Unless the mother’s mitochondrial DNA can be changed the mother’s child is doomed to inherit the these potentially debilitating or even deadly genes.  This of course presents the mother with a terrifying dilemma – choose to have a child, but then face an unusually high risk that the child will suffer from severe disease.

Lane writes about a research team at the University of Newcastle in the UK that is attempting to help mother’s with these defective mitochondrial genes avoid passing them on to their children.   The trick is to replace the defective mitochondria in the egg from the mother with healthy mitochondria from a donor mother.  According to this article, the procedure works as follows:

The procedure would involve fertilising a woman’s egg by in-vitro fertilization outside the body and transplanting the fertilised nucleus to an egg from another woman which has had its nucleus removed.

Any child born following implantation of such an embryo would have cells containing a nucleus with genes from both parents, and mitochondria from a woman other than their mother.

The ability to save a child from inheriting these dreadful diseases will be a great triumph for science, but this triumph comes with the usual moral baggage of genetic engineering.  If mitochondrial dna modification becomes successful then it is one more step of many that are bringing mankind down the path of designer babies.  At the Hub we think the choice is clear: as long as mitochondrial dna modification can safely protect a child from inheriting a debilitating or deadly disease, then it should be done.  The moral implications will just have to come along for the ride.

Morals and hope aside, the technique still requires much research before it will achieve its goals.  There are several safety issues associated with mitochondrial transfer that must be addressed to ensure that even as one disease is avoided, other diseases and complications are consequently introduced.  The relationship between mitrochondrial dna and nuclear dna is complex and researchers need to ensure that changing one does not have an unintended incompatibility with the other.

More on the status of this research can be found here and also at the University of Newcastle website for mitochondrial research.

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