With
technology rapidly advancing, people are coming up with new ways to reduce the
chances of having kids with some sort of disorder. In vitro fertilization,
which is when an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body and then
transferred to the woman’s uterus with the intention of a successful pregnancy,
has been around since 1978. Since then, researchers in Britain are now looking
at creating babies with three different people. Britain actually has laws
against the alteration of a human egg or embryo before transferring it into a
woman. However, such treatments, like the one being conducted now, are only
allowed for research. After researchers are finished, they will pass their
findings to the government in hopes of them changing the law. The reason for
researchers in Britain putting such focus on this is due to their high rate of mitochondrial
disorders. Each year about one in 200 children in Britain is born with a
mitochondrial disorder. A mitochondrial disorder is when there are “faults in a
cell’s energy source that are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female
egg.” This fault in the genetic code can later result in serious diseases
including muscular dystrophy, mental retardation, epilepsy, and heart problems.
To
try to lower the rates of this disorder, scientists came up with creating a
baby from three people – two biological mothers and a father. However, this
seemed inaccurate because there were only traces of genetic material from one
of the women. The procedure included using an egg from one woman with the
mitochondrial defects and the sperm of the father. Scientists then take that
embryo into an emptied egg from a second woman with healthy mitochondria. I
feel like this procedure will possibly cause problems one day due to the fact
there is a third party. Nevertheless, it does give hope to the women who are
afraid to have kids due to their possibility of passing down genetic issues.
Page Odom
3/21/13
3:18 PM
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