Sounds like mother & father's nuclear DNA, injected into the nucleus of a 3rd party's donor's egg cell, which contains its own mitochondrial DNA. Since mtDNA is normally inherited 100% from the mother (since the mother's egg cell supplies the mitochondria to the embryo), if the mother has a mitochondrial genetic disease, 100% of her children would normally inherit it.
Yes-- the inheritance of mtDNA is maternal, but interestingly not 100% of her children will inherit the disease. This is because the mother will have a mix of mutated (diseased) mtDNA and wild-type (healthy) mtDNA in each of her cells, including her eggs. Some of the eggs will have close to all mtDNA mutated, but many will have a relatively low mutational burden. (This variation amongst the mother's cells and eggs is called heteroplasmy). Most mitochondrial genetic diseases have a heteroplasmy threshold (varying by gene/pathway, between 30-90% for many); when the overall burden in a fertilized egg is above this threshold, the disease is manifested in the offspring. Thus, another way to circumvent the transmission of mtDNA diseases is by using regular in vitro fertilization, and checking one of the cells at the 16 or 32 cell stage for their heteroplasmic content.
Here are some references:
Lightowlers, R. N., Taylor, R. W., & Turnbull, D. M. (2015). Mutations causing mitochondrial disease: What is new and what challenges remain? Science, 349(6255), 1494–1499. http://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac7516
Taylor, R. W., & Turnbull, D. M. (2005). Mitochondrial DNA mutations in human disease. Nature Reviews Genetics, 6(5), 389–402. http://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1606
Smeets, H. J. M., Sallevelt, S. C. E. H., Dreesen, J. C. F. M., Die Smulders, C. E. M., & Coo, I. F. M. (2015). Preventing the transmission of mitochondrial DNA disorders using prenatal or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1350(1), 29–36. http://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12866
There is also the possibility that a sperm mitochondrion can be transmitted to the egg. Normally it's destroyed, but there's always exceptions in biology.
Notably, this prevents transmission of a disease that is "fatal to any baby conceived", which makes this as uncontroversial a case of a "designer baby" as I can imagine. After this, the ethics get much more complicated.
In a world with "designer babies", the rich don't just get richer, they get smarter, stronger, more attractive and start to live longer.
The poor can't afford this, so fall further and further behind, perhaps eventually humanity splits into subspecies.
This is very well trod ground. See The time machine by H G Wells with the Morlocs and Eloi, A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley with the Alphas and Betas, etc, etc...
So the more powerful a technology is in changing our capabilities as human beings, the more unethical it inherently is, because poor people will have less access to it (assuming it costs money)?
I'm not arguing on the validity of this world view, but it does seems very negative to me, since it can be applied to any powerful technology (that isn't free of charge).
I mean, computers and internet access also costs money, so does this mean that the introduction of these technologies presents an ethical problem, because the poorer part of the population may not be able to afford it, thus increasing inequality?
Just today there was an article in the newspaper of a nearby town stating that the school system there would be moving to "paperless" report cards; that is, report cards would be entirely online. (It did mention that parents could request a printed copy of their child's report card at any time.)
My first thought was "not everyone has Internet access" -- especially in this relatively small city -- and the possible ramifications of that.
Will those parents have to request a paper copy every time a report card is issued (four times per school year)? Will they eventually stop doing so? Will they stop paying attention to their child's academic progress and will the child's academic performance then suffer? Will the child slowly begin to perform worse and worse (academically) over time?
Will this "digital divide" simply continue to worsen?
Then perhaps that is a problem that we should tackle, instead of going all Luddite about fairly basic tech because someone cannot afford it?
I even wouldn't be surprised if it resulted in a net economic benefit, because the reduced overhead of new tech is less than amount of money you need to spend to make sure that everyone has access to it.
I'm sure it wouldn't be four times a year - but rather, when beginning the school year (Or possibly entering the school system even the first time) it's an option to choose. And then on the bottom of the paper report cards, have a statement saying "Like to go paperless?" for if/when they do have the option to switch.
If you need a piece of paper to remind you to be a parent, you are not a good parent to begin with. And a piece of paper is not going to save child from such parent.
That's much too harsh. If someone is poor enough they can't afford internet access, then they're probably under some stress from all sorts of factors. Working two jobs, trying to keep their head above water, possibly a single parent, etc.
Having the kid bring the paper home can be a good reminder. Even my own quite devoted mother would occasionally forget it was grade time until I'd show her the report card.
> I mean, computers and internet access also costs money, so does this mean that the introduction of these technologies presents an ethical problem, because the poorer part of the population may not be able to afford it, thus increasing inequality?
Actually, yes, there are inherent ethical problems here. In this case (computers/internet), the divide it causes is not so large that it cannot be overcome by training, savings, charitable donations, etc. However, "designer baby" technology, if not available to whomever wants it, results in an increase in feudalism to society.
With a computer, anyone can become a programmer as the technology gets cheaper and more widely adopted. Designer babies and similar technologies may not have the same increasing efficiencies with adoption; such considerations should be made.
>computers and internet access also costs money, so does this mean that the introduction of these technologies presents an ethical problem, because the poorer part of the population may not be able to afford it, thus increasing inequality?
some folks argue yes, that internet access should be a basic human right.
And this is insensitive to say, but at least it was just the enslaved minority denied basic rights, rather than every single human on the face of the earth.
I can certainly imagine why you'd want a mobile phone, but at least in our area, internet access is readily available at all public library branches as well.
> the poorer part of the
> population may not be able
> to afford it, thus
> increasing inequality?
I am currently in Bangkok, Thailand. I walked past several people sweeping streets today who all had smartphones. I can't imagine they're getting paid above the $9/day minimum wage. Notably one was packing an iPhone 4. If 3rd-world street sweepers can get online, I believe someone in America can too, without breaking the bank.
It's probably worth pointing out that the rich are already smarter, more attractive, and longer-lived than the poor. I'm not aware of a study testing rich vs poor bodily strength, but given the other results I wouldn't exactly find it surprising if the rich were stronger too.
But what the rich don't have is the raw numbers that the poor can output. The rich are already a selective group, but the poor can just throw armies of meat at the evolutionary battlefield.
It makes people dumber, weaker and uglier, relatively to those that can afford it.
There is no "dumb", "weak" or "ugly" in Nature. These are not objective measurements. They are all judgements passed comparatively to the rest of humanity.
"Lifting 100kg" is objective. Saying that "being able to lift 100kg is being strong" is not. What is not objective is saying what it takes to be considered strong. Not the measurement itself.
You imply that it was dishonest. It was absolutely not dishonest. It was precisely to emphasize my point.
My point being that the words you used were all comparisons, made in relation to a norm. That's the whole point of the thread. That it was actually impossible to use the nouns themselves ("dumb", "weak", "ugly"), exactly because there cannot be any objective measure of it in nature.
Yes, you lift Nkg. You weight Mkg. You measure Xcm. That does not tell whether you are strong, heavy or tall. These are all meaningless in a vacuum. More importantly, it does not tell whether you are stronger, heavier, taller. Stronger, heavier, taller than what, than whom?
You were excluding this context in you analysis, telling that the poors would not lose anything as they would not be worse off from their former self. The context here is that they are not measured against humanity decades, centuries earlier, but to their contemporaries, the elites that would design their babies.
It is impossible to abstract this context from the comparison, precisely because it is a comparison, and because the only meaningful comparison is that which concerns contemporaries.
Not really. Do you imagine social and economic classes and their relationship/attitudes toward another wouldn't be affected by this? Even if all it does is increase envy of the people who can't afford the treatments for their children, making that existing envy so much more concrete could have some pretty wide-reaching social consequences. No matter how strict your principle of harm.
A better analogy for "designer babies" would be performance enhancing drugs in sports. If we accept their use, then it basically becomes a requirement on anyone that wants to participate (or at least compete).
The real ethical issue is that you're giving "performance enhancers" to babies. We can't test this stuff in vitro or in adults, not really. So any baby born this way is, in some sense, an experiment.
And crucially, so are all of those babies' children and their children, because they will inherit some or all of the genetic changes.
This outlook basically presupposes that society is a competition of everyone against everyone. Does it have to be? If it does, what does "losing" mean, and can we reduce its impact to the point where it stops mattering?
One other thing. Just because I own fewer resources than someone else, doesn't mean that I "lose". I mean, you can arbitrarily define it that way, but in practice, I only need enough resources to sustain a certain quality of life. So, while universe may be finite wrt resources in theory, the actual number is so big that it may well be treated as infinite for all practical purposes, provided that we don't have unbounded population growth.
Sure, but society can prevent you from hogging too much for yourself (via taxes etc), so long as it's not 100% laissez-faire, and not just the rich have political rights.
No, but I don't see the "designer baby" tech as something that radically changes the nature of the problem (which already exists, and has existed for a long time), either. Basically, insofar as status quo is tolerable, this doesn't move the needle enough to care.
The other thing is, coming from a "well, something must be done about it" perspective, fixing these aspects of human society strikes me as the least intrusive and harmful side-effect-free approach, compared to all the other alternatives (which are mostly about tightly regulating the tech and its use). Heavy handed regulation, in particular, will just produce a black market with no regulation at all, which is likely to result in more problems in the end.
It's not always about whether or not you see everything as a competition. Consider the "requirement" nowadays of a college degree. I could say that you "need a college degree to compete in the work-force," but that doesn't mean you just need a college degree only if you want to be the "best of the best." Also see sci-fi exploration of this topic (e.g. Gattaca).
>Also see sci-fi exploration of this topic (e.g. Gattaca).
Don't use this as part of an argument. Some stories made up based on assumptions of writers not backed by any evidence have little to do with the ethical implications of actual technology.
Are you saying that we should disregard all science-fiction that has explored this topic when considering possible implications? I was referencing sci-fi as more of a "further reading" than as part of an argument.
I think the need for a college degree to even get a job is (1) specific to American society and regulations, and (2) not really true even there.
Since we're talking about general human morality, I wouldn't put much weight on the particulars of this region in 2016.
On a healthy job market, you get paid about as much as you produce. Regardless of what others produce. You also get to benefit from whatever inventions any new super talented people come up with.
Finally, the more intelligent a population is in general, the more peaceful it is.
Most world class athletes are already genetically superior by the measure of athleticism. Even though these favourable mutations or inherited traits have not been engineered, they still exist and it does enhance the athlete's performance.
> What about drugs in general, not just performance enhancing drugs? I meant, everyone want to participate in modern medical treatment, right?
What? I'm talking about performance-enhancing drugs here because they enhance performance. So everyone else operating in the same space as you will need to also use performance-enhancing drugs if they want to compete. I'm not sure why this is a hard concept to grasp.
If there were a pill you could take to turn you into the mythical "10x programmer," the implication of industry-wide usage would be that you would have to start taking that pill to participate in the industry or else you wouldn't be able to keep up.
We already have such pills, in effect. For example, someone who has depression (a very common ailment), but also has access to drugs that mitigate it, can easily be 10x better programmer relative to someone who has depression but no drugs.
Come to think of it, this goes for a lot of other things. Having a car is better than not having one, if only because you shorten commute times, and so have more free time - which translates to better rest and therefore higher productivity, or you could spend it learning new things, again, for higher productivity.
So basically anything that improves your quality of life in exchange for money is "performance enhancing" directly or indirectly.
They have in some country, if it doesn't in yours I don't think you can blame the technology involved.
There was a time in which only rich people had toilets and in-house showers, now many extremely poor people have access to those; the same thing will happen with "design babies", there will be a time where only rich people can do it, but as time goes it will become a commodity and making sure you are as healthy as possible even before born will be a human rights issue.
Sometimes here in HN you will hear about how things like name,age, etc are bias for who gets hired, and people being rejected based on those things. So just add "method of conception" to that.
I was very much annoyed by the movie when I saw it. Primarily because the "genetically inferior" person somehow had more motivation and drive than the genetically engineered ones.
So perhaps they were not so much genetically superior? Maybe motivation can be passed through DNA?
In reality, what I think might happen is some people would choose the genes they want, but others won't. At the end, people will mix, so the whole population will benefit.
> Primarily because the "genetically inferior" person somehow had more motivation and drive than the genetically engineered ones.
One thing he had over most of the "valids" was the opportunity to choose his path. The valids' parents made choices for them (Jerome was made to be a swimmer, the 12-fingered pianist, etc.). It's not wholly different than seeing a child prodigy fail as a functioning adult. They don't all, but many times when someone excels in youth in some activity and is pushed into it by the adults in their lives, a failure later leads to an inability to redirect their energy and lives (for extended periods, they become depressed). They existed for a singular purpose for so long and aren't capable (emotionally, mentally) of dealing with the freedom to choose what to do next.
Vincent's character possessed drive for several reasons: 1) he was better than his brother as a swimmer/athlete, and so knew that his in-valid status was nonsense; 2) he was resentful of being shunned by both his parents and society, and motivated by that; 3) as an in-valid, he had no purpose in life, so once he chose one, he put everything into it. The valids who still possessed their potential were similarly motivated with regard to their goals.
That's the thing. If he was the better athlete then they didn't do the generic engineering well at all.
For me the message seemed to be "don't do generic engineering because it cannot beat motivation" which discounts the potential overlap between the two and also undersells the potential gains of genetic engineering.
What if his competitors were 10x smarter and 10x faster swimmers than he was as well as being equally motivated?
A better athlete than his brother. Not than everyone. Each valid was designed by the parents for something, or in the case of his brother just generally enhanced because they weren't filthy rich.
I guess my point is that the valids could have been 100x better athletes than all the invalids which wasn't the case in the movie. For example, they could have retractable fins and could breathe under water.
Something which would make them swim a lot faster and the point of the movie would be lost.
>Primarily because the "genetically inferior" person somehow had more motivation and drive than the genetically engineered ones.
But this has nothing to do with the moral issue. Maybe it was the fact that "in-valids" had to struggle and deal with discrimination which caused the character to give his most, given that he knew where he standed while the 'valids' are in a place of comfort.
In many ways reflecting the notion of privilege. The "valids" gained much of their quality of life benefits due to the nature of their conception rather than the nature of their person. Similarly, the "in-valids" were denied those things for the same reason.
It wasn't meritocratic except within its two communities, and the one (in-valids) were denied access to the upper levels as a matter of policy.
(Some) people will design the new human for the benefit of themselves (i.e. the designer) rather than the benefit of the new human.
A few ideas that come to mind are having children with ridiculously amped loyalty, so I can condition them during their early years and then put them to work making money and simply use them as my retirement fund. I could also ensure they're suitable organ donors, and make use of their organs as my own fail.
As with every ethical question, that's only a problem if you think new humans shouldn't be explicitly created for the benefit of the creators.
There's already a demographic that'd do that sort of thing - see reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists for horrifying examples. Your concern is dead on, and we'd need some serious progress on youth rights for me to be more comfortable with unrestricted designer babies.
Interestingly, I think the current systems in most of the developed would would already handle this somewhat adequately, insofar as "designer babies" would probably not be treated as genetic children of their "gene base" parents (i.e. something they have an intrinsic right to take home from the hospital), but probably rather would be considered "genetic orphans" (like babies dropped off at a hospital with no known parents) who are then adopted by the "gene base" parents. As such, just like any other adopted children, the parents would have to go through harsh screenings to determine eligibility, and then after "adoption" would be heavily monitored by governmental child social-welfare departments (e.g. Child Protective Services in the US.)
Maybe, but that seems to assume effectively no genetic material from the parents.
What if the design starts with the parents' DNA, but makes one change to prevent a disease? Seems like that parent wouldn't be adopting a genetic orphan, and would have the right to take the newborn home. What about two changes? 50? It's one of those "where do we draw the line?" issues.
I think the natural dividing line is "is the baby the unmodified result of combining sperm and egg?" People already have the right to do that without additional government interference -- anything past that should arguably be regulated.
Where would somehow selecting one of the billions of sperm and one of the millions(?) of eggs for ideal genetic material and then allowing them to combine "naturally" fall?
That'd probably get you 60% of the way to full on designer babies anyway, unless you're going for a trait that's not at all in your gene pool.
For the record, we already do this on a surprisingly regular basis in the developed world. It's called preimplantation genetic diagnostics and is a relatively cheap addition to regular IVF since companies like Counsyl and Qwest have sub-$1000 genetic tests for thousands of genetic factors. Gender selection is already easily done and some Jewish communities have had great success eliminating Tay-Sachs this way. It's "only" a matter of identifying the genes responsible for the characteristics you desire but you may never be able to select 100% of the traits you want if you're trying to select for many of them at the same time. It's not useful for top to bottom designer babies since the probabilities of getting the right mutations and chromosomal combinations is nearly infinitesimal.
I have yet to hear any loud controversy regarding PDG IVF so I think it's one of those situations where genetic engineering will slowly creep up on society and by the time we have a public debate about the ethics it'll be way too late.
At least where I live (and I imagine many other places), the law of parenthood isn't based on genetics. Where I live, the birth mother is legally the mother, and if she says X is the father, and he agrees with her statement–by both of them signing the birth registration paperwork–then X is legally the father. (In most cases; in some cases, if the birth mother is in a marriage or cohabiting relationship with a man, her male partner is legally the father even if the birth certificate names another man, and even if that other man is genetically the father – as in the case I mention below.)
Generally speaking, genetics only comes into the picture if someone launches a court case to dispute parentage – e.g. if the mother says X is the father but he refuses to accept that status. But, if a man signs the birth papers for the child, he is legally the father, even if it isn't genetically his offspring. And likewise, if the mother gives birth to the child, she is legally the mother even if the egg came from someone else.
Genetic parenthood by itself doesn't automatically make you a legal parent. At best, it creates the possibility for you to claim parenthood (if you want to), or for someone else to impose it on you (if they want to).
An interesting court case - http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FamCA/2009/691.html - found that the birth mother's cohabiting partner was legally the father, even though the genetic father was listed on the birth certificate. This wasn't what any of the people involved wanted – the birth mother was acting as surrogate for her daughter and son-in-law, who were the genetic parents – but was an undesired to all parties side effect of the lack of legal recognition of surrogacy at the time in that part of Australia. The remedy was the genetic parents had to legally adopt the child, even though they had been raising him as their child from the time of birth.
He makes a distinction between "negative" eugenics (removing genetic disorders & decreasing mutational load) and "positive" eugenics (selecting for intelligence, appearance, personality, and other desired traits), and considers what will happen if either of those is adopted by either a minority or a majority of the populace.
At a high level, the biggest concern is if you have a minority of the population practicing positive eugenics, because it leads to a runaway "rich get richer" situation. If you think income inequality is bad now - it will only get worse.
It is pretty close to eugenics, whose ethical problems are I think well-acknowledged now. (And it's worth noting that these ethical problems were not acknowledged in the US in the early 20th century, and a very large number of reasonable people were excited about eugenics.)
Eugenics is different in that it was an attempt to make these decisions in a centralized fashion, and imposed at the entire population. Basically, "we know better" with respect to reproductive freedom.
In that sense, laws regulating how parents may or may not change the genome of their kids are closer to the concept of eugenics than laissez-faire.
Note, I'm not saying that laissez-faire here is the right approach, necessarily. Some amount of regulation is necessary, at least, to prevent parents from knowingly imposing debilitating choices on their children. Which, again, is very reminiscent of eugenics, actually, except that they got carried away with what exactly was supposed to be undesirable, and eventually made it into all-encompassing social engineering approach.
Once the option for designer babies exists, wouldn't the invisible hand of the market start trying to impose this in a centralized fashion? Medical insurance (legitimately, IMO) tries to encourage you towards preventive care over reactive care. Once this technology is freely available, wouldn't insurance companies be more inclined to pay to make your baby a designer baby instead of paying for certain types of pediatric care that designer babies don't need?
It might be. Although if it targets genuine medical conditions, which I'd imagine what they would actually care about in terms of insurance payouts, I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing.
Either way, this is yet another reason as to why healthcare should be publicly funded (or at least have a public insurance option)...
What? If the baby was made naturally by these parents, it would literally be dead within the first few years of it's life. It's not hard to improve the situation from that.
Babies that can run, jump, faster and higher, and live longer, and are generally smarter and just more advanced evolved.. It's like some breeds of dogs/monkeys are smarter than others. So will the 'smart' ones think they are better than all the rest of us.
I have a silly question - if, as observation allows, some existing people are objectively better than others at things we can measure reliably, what is the ethical problem?
Except not evolved at all, just genetically engineered by humans. Unless evolved now means semi-intelligently designed by someone with half the necessary information?
Natural Selection is normally the only means by which evolution occurs, but evolution itself is merely "descent with modification", which this would qualify as. We're really just jump-starting the mutation process, and once that part is done, whether those designer babies go on to have children of their own will come down to natural selection.
To some extent, that already happens. My wife and I had children in our late 30s and so got extra screening and ultrasounds to screen for possible devastating birth defects. Fortunately, both kids are healthy, but had they not been, we'd have been pretty far from "taking our chances".
In our case, the resources were a good health care package from my work, but it's not very far from there to designer-by-selection. I'm perfectly comfortable with our path, even though we didn't have to take any action, but would have been equally comfortable (though disappointed) had we had to intervene.
This happens in some countries even if you don't have flash insurance. Obstetric care like the above is on the state here in New Zealand. Not that complex parenting situations like 3x biological parents occur here.
Racists could try and build in genetic triggers to cause any "mixed race" grandchildren to die in the womb. This is impossible to do in general but someone might try. Imagine someone engineering "Aryan" children whose children must be blond and blue-eyed and will self-abort if not.
If this happens, you'd imagine a cottage industry of gene-drive-removers... and then genetic DRM mechanisms in turn. Not a good time for anyone.
In my view the ethical problem is the process of finding out if "designer babies" can be made without condemning a certain number of them to extreme suffering. In essence, the term "designer" is somewhat of a misnomer, unless we can precisely predict what we're going to get. And it's true that normal reproduction is also unpredictable, but at least we have a general sense of what can happen, and how often.
Heck, Sci-Fi in general. Star Trek being the most well know. The Honor Harrington books probably have the page count won in book form with the main baddy being designer babies for conquest and profit. Cauldron of Ghosts has the longest section with the explanation of the Final War.
Right, no quandary at all created by the possibility that mistakes and misunderstandings might lead to children with severe medical problems. Short, miserable lifetimes of suffering are a high cost for "improving the species", and they are a real possibility if the approach taken is to just try things that seem worth trying.
Suppose that it is possible to make genetic alterations that cause 1) rapid aging, and 2) unavoidable self-induced death at some specific age well before the organism becomes old.
Now you can make clones of yourself, add these alterations, and harvest them for organs when they die. Since they die naturally by themselves, no murder is committed.
I'm curious if this would be ruled as murder in any jurisdictions. Reading the U.S. federal definition[1], I don't see any reason why it wouldn't apply as long as intent could be proved, but IANAL.
I think the idea is rapid maturing (so you can harvest adult organs) and then a variety of specific failures (so you can harvest any type of organ).
I also think it isn't a very likely scenario, engineered organs would probably be enabled by the level of knowledge required to accelerate maturation and death and have the advantage of being faster and cheaper. Doctor's have already figured out how to make simple organs like bladders (that group is close to testing engineered livers in animals http://www.wakehealth.edu/Research/WFIRM/Projects/Human-Live... ).
That's not true. Most genetic disorders are caused by receiving one or more defective copies of a gene. In the case of a single defective gene causing the disorder, it doesn't make a difference what gene the other parent has. In the case where multiple defective copies cause the disorder, the further apart two lineages are, the less likely it becomes that they will each have defective copies of the same gene.
There's probably a higher chance of blood type incompatibilities, but that isn't a lifetime genetic disorder for the child, it just needs to be accounted for during the pregnancy.
But in this case, that was already the alternative. The parents had four miscarriages and two children die as infants. They probably weren't going to be worse off if the procedure failed.
How about a more general philosophical problem. It calls into question what is really a human. Supposing you say don't care about this concept. Then I would ask of you why you care to continue the human lineage at all. Why not just end all the lines now?
If I'm understanding correctly, this could be used for cloning if you could select two nuclei with non-overlapping chromosomes from a single person's sperm/eggs ... much easier to clone a man due the limits of egg extraction.
back of the envelope:
- each gamete has 1 of 2 choices for 23 chromosomes.
- you need to find any two non-overlapping
- probability of non-overlap is 0.5^23 for any pair
- number of pairs equals (n choose 2) where n is number of gametes = n!/ (2 * (n - 2)!) = 0.5 * n * (n-1) = 0.5 * (n^2 - n)
- to get a 50/50 chance of finding the right gametes: 0.5 = 0.5^23 * 0.5 * (n^2 - n), which is equivalent to: 0 = 0.5^23 * (n^2 -n) - 1
- solved via wolfram alpha, you would need to screen 2897 nuclei non-destructively to get a 50% chance of being able to generate a clone.
I'm not aware if this is possible or not. But obviously if you can just replace chromosomes in-nucleus that is easier than screening, but if you can do that you don't really need this whole process since you can just replace the nucleus after IVF. If you could harvest a sex cell and do meiosis in a test tube, that would also get you your nuclei right away as well -- from 10 seconds of googling, I don't think we have this yet.
I think when they screen zygotes they do it after some replication has happened, so the math really works against you if you need to combine sperm+egg pre-screen because you don't get the birthday paradox effect if you have to commit to your pairings beforehand, you'd need to huge egg supply as well.
You can't just brush it off and say it isn't a problem. Having 3 biological parents is incredibly rare and could have weird social effects for the child. It is an ethical concern if it affects how they relate to other people.
Note that this will not stop some kids from getting these type of diseases, collectively known as mitochondrial myopathies.
Some of them arise sporadically [1]
In chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia (CPEO) — a myopathy with the defining features of ophthalmoplegia and ptosis — Δ-mtDNAs are found only in muscle (implying that the deletion event occurred after fertilization in the muscle lineage of mesoderm).
How do I know ? I have a mitocondrial myopathy (CPEO). My mother was perfectly healthy and all my brothers and sisters (5) are also ok.
mtDNA is also very significant in historical migration studies... if anyone has a high level explanation of the global state of knowledge in this area I would love to see it ... trying to author a regionally focused ancient history book and piecing together the disparate pieces of supposed genetic evidence for various things is a task I am wholly unqualified for and would love some assistance with.
In another of Nick Lane's books he mentions compatibility between nuclear and mitochondrial DNA as a possible reason for variation in fertility in different species. If that's true I'd expect the 3-parent process to produce fewer pregnancies per fertilized egg than the normal 2-parent method which runs at around 50%.
It is often thought that humanity will leave no trace of its existence for the next civilization that will come, say, 20 million years from now. But I'd submit that unless something catastrophic happens very soon, one of the signs that "something" happened will be this sudden discontinuity in species history where suddenly the laws of genetics were thrown out the window for some reason, leaving its evidence both in the fossil record and in the attempts to plot out species trees based on genetic similarity.
What today we are pleased to panic about in the "Holocene extinction" may in fact just be the opening act to an explosion of diversity, and the two events would not be distinguishable in the historical record.
> It is often thought that humanity will leave no trace of its existence for the next civilization that will come, say, 20 million years
We have pretty good Trilobite fossils from 400+ million years ago. Why would they leave a trace and humanity not? (given all the stuff we produce: cities, cars, etc.)
Many human artifacts don't need to be fossilized and could be preserved for millions of years (e.g. a gold ring, a stone bracelet, concrete). Also humans deliberately bury their dead (and lots of other stuff), which in some cases might help with fossilization and preservation.
If humanity were wiped out tomorrow, I think it would leave plenty of traces that could be found and understood in millions of years by a later civilization with paleontologists are as active as ours. It's just that those traces would be relatively small and/or buried, like human fossils with jewelry and caissons (with geometric iron oxide deposits from the rebar!) from the foundations of large buildings. No monuments or cities, but enough to indicate that we were here and had technology.
Not at all. 100% of the genomic DNA of the child comes from the two parents. This is where all the genes that determine rejection live. The mitochondria are actually a completely separate organism that live inside our cells and perform a useful function - they are often fairly diverse anyway.
Having a child is a very personal decision. There are many factors, and for some, they may not feel adoption is right for them.
It doesn't mean "fuck adoption," and it certainly doesn't give you the moral high ground to judge those who decide that having their own child is the right decision for them.
And I'd add that three people having one child is a better ratio than two people having one for purposes of population control if you extrapolate out the math.
Not only that, but this is important research, whether we have too many people in the adoption system or not. The success of the human species relies on pushing our boundaries, every bit as much as it relies on taking care of one another.
I've never heard Eugenics defined in this way. I've only heard it used to mean selective planned breeding (as we do with livestock), but not intentional selective improvement of the parents' DNA.
Hitler got some of his worst ideas from the Eugenics Institute in California. Such as 'humanely' gassing undesirables and 'genetic defectives'. Eugenics, from Galton on, was considered progressive, enlightened, 'scientific' thought at the time.
The common thread in all the examples there is that choice are made for parents for the sake of society or "the race." I'm not familiar with Alien Nations so I can't speak to the OP but clearly not all genetic manipulation or screening is actually eugenics.
