United Kingdom legalizes new fertilization procedures

(Published in The Defender, 10 March 2015) The futuristic idea of three- parent babies has come to life in the United Kingdom. On Feb. 24, the House of Lords passed a law that now allows babies to be created from three people through new in-vitro fertilization procedures. This process is designed to help decrease the likelihood of genetic defects that reside in the mitochondria of the mother. “We have two genomes,” said Mark Lubkowitz, a genetics professor at St. Michael’s College. “We have the nuclear genome, and we have the mitochondrial genome, which has thousands of genes, and the mitochondria is maternally inherited.” A female donor with healthy mitochondria is selected, and her mitochondria replaces the faulty mitochondria of the birth mother. The baby will then no longer have the mitochondrial defects of its mother, and it won’t pass any along to its own children. While this concept’s intention is to bring positive outcomes and outlooks, some believe the ethics behind it are questionable. The Catholic Church in particular has adamantly expressed its disapproval of the process. “I am very disappointed by the vote,” said Bishop John Sherrington of the Archdiocese of Westminster in a radio interview with Vatican Radio Station out of London on Feb. 25. At the same time, however, Sherrington wasn’t surprised by the outcome. “The dignity of the human embryo is not respected,” Sherrington said in the interview. And according to him, it has been that way for the past few decades. “A lot of people are swayed by a very scientific view, and therefore the Catholic perspective… is not adequately respected and understood,” he added. As a representative of the Catholic perspective, Sherrington’s main concern is the public health and safety regarding this procedure. “We obviously don’t know all the consequences, as one doesn’t with any science, but I had hoped there would be a greater emphasis on caution and safety,” Sherrington said. And will this new procedure really solve the problems of genetic defects? “It’s not really that simple,” Lubkowitz said with a laugh. “It’s all about shifting probabilities. You found a gene, or a variant of a gene… that changes your probability of a disease by x number of points.” According to Leah Weyerts Burke, M.D., a clinical geneticist at The University of Vermont Medical Center, the basic in-vitro process is used in the U.S. and has been for a long time. “The difference here is that they’re stripping the mitochondria out of the eggs of the woman who has the mitochondrial mutations and they’re adding mitochondria from another source,” Burke said. “But they’re not adding any nuclear DNA, sothat’s really the only difference in this procedure.” “Nuclear DNA” refers to DNA found in the nuclei of cells. It contains more of the genome than mitochondria, and information can be passed to the child from both parents rather than just the mother. “There’s something called CRISPR,” Lubkowitz said. CRISPR stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. “It enables you to go in and edit a genome,” Lubkowtiz said. “You don’t replace things, you just go in and fix the mutation you want.” In this process, only the two parents are needed. “You haven’t added a donor to replace the mitochondrial parent, you’ve just fixed the one that you always had,” Lubkowitz said. “But then there’s that slippery zone, because now you’re going in and fixing people’s genomes to the way you want them fixed.” This brings up the concept of this new procedure leading to a world where a child’s genes can be manipulated in such a way that a “perfect child” or “designer baby” is created. “It depends on what you call a designer baby,” Burke said. “A lot of traits people might choose in a ‘designer baby’ are not single gene traits, so you couldn’t really test for them anyway, like certain looks, or intelligence, or that sort of thing.” While Lubkowitz could see this process coming to the United States, he doesn’t see it going as far as altering the baby’s physical or mental prowess prior to birth. “Do I see it to the point where people are saying, ‘Oh, I want to go in and edit my mitochondria so I have children that are really good at endurance?’ I don’t see that happening,” Lubkowtiz said. However, this procedure could be a stepping point in that direction. “Again, the scientific view has dominated,” Sherrington said. “And I think we need to stand back and ask fundamental questions again about the protection of human life and the important relationship between parents and children.” ​The U.K. is the first country to allow this method to be used. While only a limited number of couples will be able to use this process each year, it is predicted that the first three person baby will be born as soon as next year.