UK agency favors creating babies from 3 people
Source: Agencies |
March 21, 2013, Thursday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
BRITAIN'S fertility regulator says it has found broad public support for in vitro fertilization techniques that allow babies to be created with DNA from three people for couples at risk of passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases. It also found there was no evidence to suggest the techniques were unsafe.
Critics, however, slammed the decision as a breach of ethics, saying there were already safe methods like egg donation to allow people to have children without mitochondria defects.
Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority began a public discussion of the topic at the government's request last year.
"Although some people have concerns about the safety of these techniques, we found that they trust the scientific experts and the regulator to know when it is appropriate to make them available to patients," Lisa Jardine, chair of the group, said in a statement yesterday.
British law forbids altering a human egg or an embryo before transferring it into a woman, so such treatments are currently only allowed for research. The regulator will now pass its findings to the government, which would need Parliamentary permission to change the law.
Similar research is going on in the US, where the embryos are not being used to produce children. About one in 200 children every year in Britain is born with a mitochondrial disorder, faults in a cell's energy source that are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female egg. Mistakes in the mitochondria's genetic code can result in serious diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, heart problems and mental retardation.
David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, called the HFEA recommendations "a travesty of basic medical ethics." Others however called it progress for those with mitochondrial diseases.
"This technique does involve a step into new scientific territory," said Marita Polschmidt of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. "But it is a calculated, specific step with the sole aim of preventing a potentially fatal condition from being passed down to the next generation."
Critics, however, slammed the decision as a breach of ethics, saying there were already safe methods like egg donation to allow people to have children without mitochondria defects.
Britain's Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority began a public discussion of the topic at the government's request last year.
"Although some people have concerns about the safety of these techniques, we found that they trust the scientific experts and the regulator to know when it is appropriate to make them available to patients," Lisa Jardine, chair of the group, said in a statement yesterday.
British law forbids altering a human egg or an embryo before transferring it into a woman, so such treatments are currently only allowed for research. The regulator will now pass its findings to the government, which would need Parliamentary permission to change the law.
Similar research is going on in the US, where the embryos are not being used to produce children. About one in 200 children every year in Britain is born with a mitochondrial disorder, faults in a cell's energy source that are contained outside the nucleus in a normal female egg. Mistakes in the mitochondria's genetic code can result in serious diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, heart problems and mental retardation.
David King, director of Human Genetics Alert, called the HFEA recommendations "a travesty of basic medical ethics." Others however called it progress for those with mitochondrial diseases.
"This technique does involve a step into new scientific territory," said Marita Polschmidt of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign. "But it is a calculated, specific step with the sole aim of preventing a potentially fatal condition from being passed down to the next generation."
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