News has broken today of ten human embryos having been ‘created’ by researchers at
The claim for this ‘breakthrough is that medicine will be able to ‘engineer’ mitochondrial defects out of human offspring and generations, in the future.
Many ‘inherited’ metabolic and other diseases are the result of faulty mitochondrial DNA, which is only inherited via the mother. Examples include some inherited forms of diabetes, deafness, blindness and epilepsy. The stakes are high.
Mitochondrial DNA is in the cell but not in its nucleus. It resides in organelles within the cytoplasm, called mitochondria. Therefore, workers have transferred the nucleus from a fertilised embryo within a ‘faulty’ human egg (i.e. formed from the gametes of the two natural parents) into an enucleated ‘healthy’ human egg (ovum) from a female third party.
Moral and ethical arguments are, of course, already being voiced both 'for' and 'against'.
We shall see but it would seem to me, thinking logically, that one possibility with this work is that we could thereby be ‘creating’ embryos that are analogous to running software in a computer with a mismatched operating system. It may run OK for a while, until it hits an incompatibility snag.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/05/sciparent105.xml
As a corollary to this item, our observation that it takes three generations for vaccine-related faults to be eliminated from a colony could be down to this mitochondrial DNA being altered by vaccination and taking time (generations) to work its way out or to be ‘repaired’ out of the system.