Friday human interest story. A great way to help people with defective mitochondria, you take out the nucleus of the fertilized egg and stick it into the "shell" of one with healthy mitochondria from a 3rd donor. So you end up with a child having DNA from 3 different people.
Time to wonder if someone who supplied 0.1% of a child's DNA has any legal rights in regards to that child? Should they? Slippery slope, blah, blah? While only a little bit of DNA, there are some interesting ramifications, for example female genealogy is traced using mitochondrial DNA (since prior to this little procedure it's solely passed from mother to child), so that's out the window. Your great-great grand daughter won't be able to find out her distant relatives via current methods (of course we'll all have latent psychic power by that point, so it's probably not worth worrying about). The plus side is you're actually removing the defective genetic material entirely from your bloodline. No worry about your kids or grand-kids being a carrier for something 100 years down the road (or at least the same something...). This count as genetic engineering yet?
Any thoughts? (other than "is this seriously the best thing you could come up with on a slow Friday?" )
Edited, Jun 28th 2013 10:53am by someproteinguy