U.K. Babies Born with Three Genetic Parents

I comment on the profound ethical implications of these techniques.

Gabrielle Etzel at the Washington Examiner reports on the recent announcement that eight babies were born in the U.K. via ‘three-parent IVF,’ reigniting ethical debates on in vitro fertilization, gene editing, and the role of DNA in human identity. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine documented that eight children conceived via a controversial artificial reproductive technology procedure have gone on to live what appear, so far, to be healthy lives largely free of complications.

This involves a procedure that advocates call ‘mitochondrial transfer,’ designed to produce a child free of debilitating mitochondrial disease. Etzel explains:

At the heart of the process are the mitochondria, the organelles called the “powerhouse of the cell” because they make energy. Mothers pass their mitochondria to their children. If a mother’s egg cell has mitochondrial dysfunction, as a result of damaged mitochondrial DNA, then that will be passed to her child, likely resulting in potentially severe chronic diseases.

Mitochondrial transfer uses the IVF process to mix the gametes, or sex cells, of three parents: the egg and sperm of the biological mother and father, and the donor egg that is unaffected by mitochondrial disease.

The hope of parents is to prevent debilitating mitochondrial diseases from being passed down to their children, but opponents argue that creating a child with three genetic parents is unnatural.

This process, the article explains, involves two techniques that potentially have different ethical implications because one arguably involves the destruction of additional human embryos while the other only involves the destruction of gametes (egg cells). In either case, however, there are serious ethical implications for creating a child with three genetic parents. The author cites Vardit Ravitsky, president of the nonpartisan bioethics group The Hastings Center, who rejects the notion that such techniques involve “playing God”: 

Ravitsky said mitochondrial transfer is “deeply different than gene editing,” such as through CRISPR technology, because mitochondrial DNA does not play the same role as cellular DNA in the nucleus for creating a personal identity.

She said conflating nuclear gene editing and mitochondrial transfer is “scientifically misguided” because the latter “has basically no consequences of that type that editing the nuclear DNA would have.”

“It’s the [nuclear] DNA that makes us who we are, that’s responsible for our entire phenotype,” Ravitsky said. “Our physical traits, or some of our personality traits, our decisive risk that we carry, everything that we are, whereas the mitochondria, as far as we know, is not responsible for any trait. It’s just a source of energy.”

However, I do not find this argument compelling or convincing. The author quotes your scribe in rejoinder:

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and bioethicist at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, told the Washington Examiner that he does not buy the argument that mitochondrial DNA is negligible, especially because we do not understand everything genes do for the body.

“We don’t know what most genes do, including the 37 genes in the mitochondria,” Kheriaty said. “At least, we don’t know everything they do.”

He also said mitochondrial DNA must do something more than just power the mitochondria themselves because of the way diseased mitochondria manifest in physical symptoms for a patient.

If mitochondrial DNA was insignificant, Kheriaty reasoned, there would not be advocates of the procedure “bending over backwards and going through an enormously complicated process to change the mitochondrial DNA.”

Any discussion of DNA evokes the question of identity, but there is a great debate about how much of a difference mitochondrial DNA actually makes.

Kheriaty argued that, even if mitochondrial DNA only plays a small role in a person’s identity, it still may matter to the child in some fundamental, psychological way as they mature.

“We’re tinkering with something here that’s very deep,” Kheriaty said, “and, you know, for a child to discover that ‘I have a second genetic mother who contributed something to who I am,’ right, ‘maybe not most of who I am, maybe not the most important parts, maybe not the most obvious phenotypes, but something,’ you know, we don’t actually know yet what that’s going to mean to that person.”

Children conceived through conventional artificial reproductive technology using donated sperm or eggs can have problems growing up, not knowing their parentage.

A 2021 study from professors at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics found that people conceived via sperm or egg donation “experienced significant distress upon learning about the nature of their conception.”

About 85% of the 143 people surveyed reported a shift in their “sense of self” upon learning about their conception, and half sought psychological help to cope. Three in four said they thought “often or very often” of the nature of their conception.

Kheriaty said the ethical implications of identity surrounding mitochondrial transfer “doesn’t automatically mean that it’s wrong,” but he said people must tread with caution.

“We’re touching on something and we’re tinkering with something that’s deeply human, that’s deeply embedded in our collective experience, in our society, in our laws, in our notions of identity, and selfhood,” he said.

Stay tuned here for more commentary on the brave new biotechnological world of gene editing, artificial games, and assisted reproductive technologies.

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