Britain is planning to go ahead with the Thee Parent IVF for Fertility treatment.
This would help parents with Mitochondrial Disorder in preventing the faulty Genes responsible for this disorder from being passed on to the child.
The other fall out is this would help make ‘Designer Babies,’, made to order.
Though there are objections to this on ethical grounds, it is a welcome step for people misuse any anything if it suits them.
The Process involved is as follows.
Two eggs are created fertilized with Sperm, one from the Donor and another from the parents.
Then an Embryo is created each from the Parent and another from the Donor.
The pro-nuclei , which contain the genetic information, are removed from both Embryos, but only the parents are kept.
A healthy embryo is created by adding the parents ‘ pro-nuclei to the Donor Embryo, which is finally implanted in the womb.
“The process of producing a three-parent baby involves taking the nucleus of one egg and inserting it into the cytoplasm of another egg which has had its nucleus removed, but still containsmitochondrial DNA, and then fertilizing the hybrid egg with a sperm. The purpose of the procedure is to remove a nucleus from a cell with defective mitochondria and place it in a donor cell with healthy mitochondria, which after fertilisation will contain a nucleus with genetic material from only the two parents.”( wiki)
Would it not be better, if only one parent is suffering from the Mitochondrial Disorder,use the healthy parents’ Cell and go in for IVF?
Or am I mistaken?
Doctor friends may respond.
Parents at high risk of having children with severe disabilities such as muscular dystrophy will be offered the controversial new IVF treatment after it was given the green light by ministers today.
It means the world’s first “three-parent baby” could be born in Britain by 2015, if detailed proposals for regulating the procedure pass a public consultation and are approved by Parliament next year.
Up to 10 patients per year are expected to undergo the treatment, which involves replacing a fraction of the mother’s damaged DNA with that of a healthy donor.
The process avoids the risk of the mother passing inherited defects, which can lead to a host of rare and debilitating conditions affecting the heart, muscles and brain, on to her children.
The technique is controversial because it involves “germ line” modification of the embryo’s DNA, meaning the third party’s genetic material would not only be passed on to the child, but also to future generations down the female line.”
What is In Vitro Fertilization?
In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a process by which an egg is fertilised by sperm outside the body: in vitro. IVF is a major treatment for infertility when other methods of assisted reproductive technology have failed. The process involves monitoring a woman’s ovulatory process, removing ovum or ova(egg or eggs) from the woman’s ovaries and letting sperm fertilise them in a fluid medium in a laboratory. When a woman’s natural cycle is monitored to collect a naturally selected ovum (egg) for fertilisation, it is known as natural cycle IVF. The fertilised egg (zygote) is then transferred to the patient’suterus with the intention of establishing a successful pregnancy. The first successful birth of a “test tube baby”, Louise Brown, occurred in 1978. Louise Brown was born as a result of natural cycle IVF. Robert G. Edwards, the physiologist who developed the treatment, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010.
The term in vitro, from the Latin meaning in glass, is used, because early biological experiments involving cultivation of tissues outside the living organism from which they came, were carried out in glass containers such as beakers, test tubes, or petri dishes. Today, the term in vitro is used to refer to any biological procedure that is performed outside the organism it would normally be occurring in, to distinguish it from an in vivo procedure, where the tissue remains inside the living organism within which it is normally found. A colloquial term for babies conceived as the result of IVF, “test tube babies”, refers to the tube-shaped containers of glass or plastic resin, called test tubes, that are commonly used in chemistry labs and biology labs. However, in vitro fertilisation is usually performed in the shallower containers called Petri dishes. One IVF method, Autologous Endometrial Coculture, is actually performed on organic material, but is still considered in vitro.