Scientists in the US have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a provocative technique that someday could be used to prevent babies from inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.

The researchers at Oregon Health Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce children, and it is not clear when or even if the technique will be put to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.

The British experiments reported in 2008, led to headlines about the possibility someday of babies with three parents. But that’s an overstatement. The DNA from the second woman amounts to less than one per cent of the embryo’s genes, and it isn’t the sort that makes a child look like mum or dad. The procedure is simply a way of replacing some defective genes that sabotage the normal workings of cells. The British government is asking for public comment on the technology before it decides whether to allow its use. One concern it cites is whether such DNA alteration could be an early step down a slippery slope toward ‘designer babies’ – ordering, say, a petite, blue-eyed girl or tall, dark-haired boy. Questions have also arisen about the safety of the technique, not only for the baby who results from the egg, but also for the child’s descendants.

In June, an influential British bioethics group concluded that the technology would be ethical to use if proven safe and effective. An expert panel in Britain said in 2011 that there was no evidence the technology was unsafe but urged further study. Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University in the US, said in an interview that safety problems might not show up for several generations. She said she hopes the United States will follow Britain’s lead in having a wide-ranging discussion of the technology.

While the kind of diseases it seeks to fight can be terrible, ‘this might not be the best way to address it,’ Zoloth said. Over the past few years, scientists have reported that such experiments produced healthy monkeys and that tests in human eggs showed encouraging results. The US scientists reported on Wednesday that they have produced about a dozen early human embryos and found the technique is highly effective in replacing DNA. The genes they want to replace aren’t the kind most people think of,which are found in the nucleus of cells and influence traits such as eye colour and height. Rather, these genes reside outside the nucleus in energy-producing structures called mitochondria.

These genes are passed along only by mothers, not fathers. About one in every 5000 children inherits a disease caused by defective mitochondrial genes. The defects can cause many rare diseases with a host of symptoms, including strokes, epilepsy, dementia, blindness, deafness, kidney failure and heart disease. The new technique, if approved someday for routine use, would allow a woman to give birth to a baby who inherits her nucleus DNA but not her mitochondrial DNA. Here’s how it would work: Doctors would need unfertilised eggs from the patient and a healthy donor. They would remove the nucleus DNA from the donor eggs and replace it with nucleus DNA from the patient’s eggs. They would end up with eggs that have the prospective mother’s nucleus DNA, but the donor’s healthy mitochondrial DNA.

In a report published online on Wednesday by the journal Nature, Shoukhrat Mitalipov and others at OHSU report transplanting nucleus DNA into 64 unfertilised eggs from healthy donors. After fertilisation, 13 eggs showed normal development and went on to form early embryos. The researchers also reported that four monkeys born in 2009 from eggs that had DNA transplants remain healthy.

Mitalipov said in an interview that the researchers hope to get federal approval to test the procedure in women, but that current restrictions on using federal money on human embryo research stand in the way of such studies.

The research was funded by the university and the Leducq Foundation in Paris. Dr Douglass Turnbull of Newcastle University in Britain, whose team has transplanted DNA between eggs using a different technique, called the new research ‘very important and encouraging’ in showing that such transplants could work. But ‘clearly, safety is an issue’ with either technique if it is applied to humans, he said.

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Mehn,science is something else althogether...

Breath-taking Breakthrough

mkmyers45: Breath-taking Breakthrough

Yeah, giving heathens more reasons to say 'GOD doesn't EXIST'

seriallink:

Yeah, giving heathens more reasons to say 'GOD doesn't EXIST'

Chill bro..its all good innit?

^^^Quite a nice medical breakthrough though!

great discovery

While some are battling with how to get 24 hour electricity

One man Gej, two women Dam and Dame, one embryo Timaya..

seriallink:

Yeah, giving heathens more reasons to say 'GOD doesn't EXIST'

Giving God less 'miracles' to claim..

Nawa oOh

Interesting..
Na to dey order babies by giving specific requirements in the near future...
...a tall dark-haired chocolatey boy with eequisitely handsome features is what i'd order!!!

[color=#000099][/color] nice one their

1 The serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild animals the LORD God had made. One day he asked the woman, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?”
2 “Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” the woman replied.

3 “It’s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, ‘You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die.’”
4 “You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman.

5 “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

22 Then the LORD God said, “Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil. What if they reach out, take fruit from the tree of life, and eat it? Then they will live forever!”

Short of words. Another advancement in science.

[color=#006600][/color]
Simply anoda trickish method of evolving dis generation X to a more sophiscated homo sapiens sapiens as prognosticated by the father of ''d Theory of Evolution''- Charles Robert Darwin 1882.
Atlst dt wl b understandable chikina.

some will be blabbing here saying God does not exist, and yet they will carry their bibles on sunday nd still go to church, useless set of people, they wil say things just because others are saying it, mtcheeew!!

And as for the scientist, they have tried, but there are some certain things they will never be able to do, let them create a new life if they can, let them ignite a dead life if they can, let them create blood if they can, let them create a plastic vein if they can

Oh God! You are the most high over all the earth!

[quote author=wandeay]some will be blabbing here saying God does not exist, and yet they will carry their bibles on sunday nd still go to church, useless set of people, they wil say things just because others are saying it, mtcheeew!!

And as for the scientist, they have tried, but there are some certain things they will never be able to do, let them create a new life if they can, let them ignite a dead life if they can, let them create blood if they can, let them create a plastic vein if they can

Oh God i seconded! True talk

musKeeto:
Giving God less 'miracles' to claim..

Huh? Blasphemy continues... Smh 4 you!