Maybe if you suppress the immune system, introduce working mitochondria, and then stop taking the immunosuppressants, any mitochondria that are still outside cells get cleaned up and the ones that got absorbed are shielded and can do their job.
Amazing the domino effect.
I am by no means a callous person, in fact, my therapist tells me I have a problem with too much empathy, and in no way do I wish parents to loose their children so young.
But what I am also not is a eugenicist, which is what this is, eugenics.
"Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population."
Now remember, first they are only preventing the chance of a baby being born with mitochondrial disease. But more importantly, these mitochondrial diseases are still evident in the human population because there is some survival advantage. This is what happens with sickle cell disease [1]. The sacrifices these babies make, dying so young, is a sacrifice for the survival of a genetic population. In the case of mitochondrial diseases, this favors the survival of female babies over male babies, or even the benefit of higher amounts of oxidative stess in the mother to fight off infection.
So by this method, even the female baby will be born without the Mitochondrial mutation. What will this mean for her?
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/evolution/mitochondrial-dna-evolu...
"Accordingly, their model revealed that some mutations confer a net replicative advantage over unmutated (wildtype) mtDNA, causing the mutant mtDNA to proliferate within individual organisms."
We know so little and we are acting like we know everything. Humanity needs to stop thinking we are gods and accept our fates. Eugenicists thought they knew what the best genes were to survive, and this is no different.
[1] https://globalhealthnow.org/2024-06/how-sickle-cell-disease-...
This is different, another step in the erasure of genes that harm humans. This is not a genocide.
It seems like your argument boils down to we should continue to have horrible suffering and early death because diversity of DNA is good and we shouldn't edit out potentially helpful mutations (that also cause horrible suffering) - if we can beat malaria, why would we need sickle cell?
[0] https://3billion.io/blog/whole-genome-sequencing-cost-2023
These activities are in no way evidence for people thinking (too?) highly of themselves or "as gods". Just a completely made up accusation.
I also don't see why the scary labels are relevant necessarily. To be afraid of whether this qualifies as eugenics or if you qualify as an eugenicist is sitting backwards on the horse completely. But maybe I just misinterpreted your catious wording and there's no being afraid here - in other comments you outright state you consider this eugenics, for example.
> [As] Humanity[, we need to] accept our fates.
No, we really don't. Though if you and people of the same opinion just accept fate, you also accept this research and similar continuing on, so maybe this is not even a point of debate in practice.
Kinda funny to attack TFA by associating it with a naughty word while tracking in such awful ideas as if we're unable to evaluate the ideas ourselves.
Selective breeding in livestock, mate selection in wild animals and humans...
I do understand your point. I struggle with whether it is cause for (more than theoretical) concern.
The ethical quandaries don't seem that important when it's isolated to expression of personal choice.
State-driven decisions are ugly of course. And perhaps the insanity that we see in dog breeding is very bad.
But we don't see the dog breeding problems in human parents (aside from the initial mate selection, which can be vicious!).
So where does that leave us? Using blunt tools is OK but precise tools are bad?
Are you fairly religious, if you don't mind my asking?
I think a lot of these biotechs that raise alarms are pretty safe, and the problem is that we’re really bad at explaining in lay terms how it all works, and people naturally assume the worst.
I think it’s also an issue of practicality (and this is where it flirts with being eugenics). What’s the alternative? To tell people not to reproduce if they have known disease prone genes? To make them not reproduce? To tell them they don’t get universal healthcare if they do?
I think mucking about with our building blocks is the least bad option we have.
> What’s the alternative?
Acceptance. These parents can still reproduce. A female child will most likely be healthy, like the mother. And the male child will not always be born with a mitochondrial disease. People do not realize that father's can also pass mitochondrial genetics to their children. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/6639/)
In trying to remove all risk from our lives we are making it inherently risky in other, usually unknown, ways.
All the spiritual practices talk about acceptance, so just pick one.
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
You're literally advocating for letting genetic diseases cull the afflicted populations, "selecting for the better genes" that way. Seemingly the exact opposite of your claimed position, I hope you appreciate.
Or you have no problem with selection as long as "nature does it"? That's the best idea I have for reconciling this at least. Are we humans not part of nature though? Is you preferring what nature does not just a preference still?
If we figure out that some specific genetic difference results in people eventually dying before they reproduce, what's the difference between editing that out vs. letting nature do its thing?
We're not that smart. Everything has unintended consequences. One example some people have studied is sickle-cell anemia. It's a recessive trait so if you get two copies of the gene you get sickle-cell which is a horrible disease. However, if you only get one copy of the gene it provides substantial immunity against malaria.
Now, maybe in this case you could say, okay, we will cure malaria somehow, not worth sickle-cell existing. But the thing is that gene isn't "the gene for sickle-cell anemia," nor is it even "the gene for malaria resistance and sickle-cell anemia." It affects hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of different things.
I think there are some conditions where I don't have a problem doing that, and sickle-cell, mitochondrial disease, these things do seem "bad enough" to be worth putting our fingers on the scale. But I am not sure it's so clear-cut, and I think it's right to say that eugenics are categorically suspect.
How do you determine that? We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons, and build machines that understand human language (if ever so fleetingly). Unless how we work is fundamentally betraying how we can reason about the world, and we find that that's intrinsically linked to our genetics, I really don't see us not cracking it eventually proper.
> Everything has unintended consequences.
People use medications every single day that are effective for what they are taking it for, yet have "unintended consequences" that are consciously ignored or are found otherwise negligible by them. Seems like unintended consequences are not a blocker. The criteria hasn't been perfection even up to this point, it's always been a desperation-driven best-effort. Much like life and civilization as a whole.
I can appreciate e.g. hesitance in taking on the responsibility of possibly being wrong about how something like this works - nature cannot be blamed, but humans can and that feels bad. But the alternative is pretty clear and is not going away on its own. I'm pretty sure at least that just like how genetic traits can be evolved multiple times independently, genetic defects can be too. This is also why I think to characterize this as eugenics is extremely and fundamentally wrong. Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on - a concept that flagrantly flies in the face of this independent recurrence effect, for one.
The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on
Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance. They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
> The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.
That is a very far removed interpretation of what I wrote. As I'm sure you're aware, nuclear bombs operate on fission (or in rarer cases, fission and fusion). These are atomic-scale processes, but do not involve atomic-scale control (or in some cases, even control at all - natural fission sites exist). A more faithful example for what I said would be semiconductor manufacturing, where the state of the art is 40-atoms wide tracks of patterning resolution. The atomic pick-and-place I describe was demonstrated, but has no practical implementations that I'm aware of (would be way too slow). But even if we go back to fission, nuclear plants are providing stable, relatively clean baseline power at reasonable costs, and for better or for worse, the world didn't yet descend into WW3 either, and it's more than fair to speculate that this is due to the temporary checkmate nuclear bombs provide us. So as far as I'm concerned, no, I think we're pretty alright still.
> Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“.
But your position doesn't seem to care much for if this assumption is correct or not. Even if it's bang-on perfectly correct, you stated that this is eugenics period, therefore it's bad. Was that not what you meant to suggest then?
> They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason.
How would you know? What if I disagree that reason and purpose are ontologically real?
> Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral.
I disagree that human genetics would be a conscious process, and that it can thus care about things. I also disagree that it can know anything about morals - morals are a human concept, and they're not even universally shared across us. Very clearly just the two of us seem to hold ourselves to very different definitions of what's moral, for example.
> It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
I don't suppose you're claiming that this treatment (or other genetic treatments) result(s) in the vast majority of the patients dying?
As a parent of young kids, this is a core issue I grapple with. I want my kids to have fun and take risks and learn how to handle the bumpiness of life. But I don’t want my kids being maimed or killed.
I think the argument could be simplified to “we’re collectively better off if we live in a manner where one consequence is that x% of us will get badly hurt.” And I personally believe that’s a true statement.
My youngest was one of the x%. He played in a risky way (that was entirely normal when I was a kid) and later that night a team of orthopedic pediatric surgeons had to put his body back together.
The hardest thing for me is not to be constantly saying “that’s too high; get down from there; don’t go too far; slow down” because that trauma lives with his mom and I far more than it does with him. But I believe it’s important for him to keep taking risks.
I also believe it’s up to each parent to decide how they want to raise their kids. We don’t get to collectively decide for the parents.
Which relates back to the topic: I think it’s collectivism vs. individualism. I believe we cannot decide for people that they don’t get a choice in the matter. Even if one might argue that this poses a collective risk to the population.
The idea of individualism is a hard one for me. Are we really individuals? I mean, we get half our genetics from each parent, so where is the individual? Can any of you live as a total individual, without the assistance of even a small group? When in human history, even primate history, have you seen our species survive without a community?
When a parent makes this decision for gene therapy, that does not just affect the parents, it affects the child (the outcome of which is still not understood) and it affects those child's children.
Natural selection exists for a reason, but the eugenicists think they can control it.
Comparing gene therapy to cognitive therapy (telling your kids to not be stupid), is in no way comparable. Doing gene therapy is not "raising your kids", it is creating your kids.
I am saying this as someone who lives with THREE genetic disorders. von Hippel-Lindau syndrome (Father and Mother, hemangioblastomas), Cystathionine beta-synthase deficiency (Mother, homocystinuria), and a DNM1L Deficiency that leads to mitochondrial fission dysfunction (myoptahy, ME/CFS, OCD, Anxiety, Asperger's).
Correct me if I am wrong because I am absolutely not a historian. Eugenics was horrible not because we understand Mendellian genetics but because it was forced on people in the intent to allegedly "improve" a (political boundary placeholder)'s population in some way that was outright obscene, including use by Nazi Germany and many other places and regimes. US courts, etc.
I think the difference here is that the technology is not forced to be used.
And besides, aren’t we forcing these genetic changes onto the children without their consent?
If there is a way to detect or prevent genetic defects before the kids are born, we should really allow people to make a choice.
And I really don't care if doctors mix genetic material from 3 people to make a healthy baby. It's still a form of evolution. I'd think we should really try to give two people who really want to have a kid a chance to have a healthy kid...
But my bigger point is that it is still eugenics. And that is bad no matter what the goal is.
They should not mess with genes where the sciences is not 100% settled but that still leaves a lot's of mutations known to be 100% deleterious. There are no benefits in having hereditary blindness, deafness or schizophrenia!
Because I know more about how integrated and complicated genetics is than you?
Now you’re talking about editing out polymorphisms, not even mutations? Did you know the COMT is only a minor risk for schizophrenia, right? And that it not only metabolize is catecholamines, but also estrogens? How did you know the COMT enzyme is stimulated by magnesium and SAMe? Maybe the person needs just more of those than needing to have genetic therapy.
That variant of the COMT gene have a mountain of evidence against it and no evidence showing any benefit whatsoever. The fact that the COMT enzyme is also implicated in estrogen metabolism is not an argument for or against editing out the known defective variant of the COMT gene.
There is an argument to be made that we should wait until medical science has the means to cleanly and reliably do a single gene edit but I don't buy the argument that removing a gene variant from the humans genes pool is eugenics therefore it's bad and should be forever forbidden.
When you look at a single gene, you can see there’s no benefit. But when you look at the gene in contacts of the whole genome, there could certainly be a benefit to having a slower COMT enzyme.
For example, in someone with higher homocysteine, this would be an advantage.
So you see the problem, you see the gene is bad because of looking at the gene as an individual, but I see it as probably beneficial when I look at the whole genome. And this is why I am against gene editing. Unless you take the gene, you wanna edit in the full context of the whole genome you don’t see the bad effects it might have in the long run. And who is doing that? nobody.
Of course, science fictions authors,scientists and philosophers have written plenty of material on the matter and the danger of such societies... and it might blow up in our face one way or another, but nothing aside of our demise can stop scientific progress...
Or adopt?
This feels a bit narcissistic. If you and your partner determine you have genetic traits you'd rather not have, you have the option of not having biological children.
This just feels like it's going to open Pandora's box. You and your partner are short and near sighted, edit in some height and vision.
You're partner has ethnic traits they don't want to pass on ? Just edit those out.
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.
God forbid this ever comes to America's profit driven health system. The rich would have the option to edit in "better" traits. Gattica here we come
And? I suspect that when the first glasses were made, someone complained about people playing God, too: why do you want to correct your eyesight when you were not intended to see well by the Almighty?
Correction of genetic problems early on seems a lot better than various complicated treatments down the line.
"Strange" often means just "we are not used to it", but the next generations will take such things for absolutely granted.
It is no less strange that I, a Central European, am talking to an American in almost real time and free of charge, and can read his replies. That would be indeed very strange to anyone prior to 1995 or so.
And yeah, this connectedness has downsides as well, but we may work on them.
In some Asian countries modifying your eyes to look white is a common practice. You could easily end up with biracial people editing out some of their more ethnic features for the next generation.
Not to mention their might be some mistakes along the way. You can't git reset --hard a human.
As imperfect as humans are, that's what makes us human.
Now if as a consenting adult you want to modify yourself, laser eye surgery, etc, go ahead.
Obviously there are degrees to what is considered a problem.
Few people would argue for leaving Huntington's or ALS-related code in. That is just cruel.
There are deaf activists who protest any attempts to cure deafness, but I would say most people won't agree with them either.
Eye color may not be a problem per se, but does not strike me as particularly important either - unless the state is based on some neo-racist ideology, it probably should not regulate this.
IMHO the real zone of shadows begins at outright enhancements, especially those that will have downsides. Maybe a certain gene sequence taken from bats or whales will confer high resistance to cancer, but at the cost of XXX or YYY. This is the sort of decision that will be really hard.
You're talking about experimenting on non consenting subjects. Why stop at 3 parents. Why not 300. Splice in all the DNA you want.
Then 20 years later when the test subject has horrific side effects due to processes we don't understand, ohh well that's the cost of progress.
Adopt who? There is almost no children available for adoption, only highly handicapped children who needs an auxiliary family.
Might be easier with a donor egg, but where are you going to get that? Egg donation is highly regulated and many would find it hard to get a donor. Of course this solution also requires a donor egg, so you'd already need to have that available.
This is not true, at least in the United States. For one thing, there are many children in foster care who want to be adopted. It is also possible, though difficult and expensive, to adopt infants from mothers giving up their children for adoption as well. I am not saying it's an easy option or that everyone should do it, but it is an option.
The cold truth is that it is thus inevitable that in the future humanity will need gene modification to avoid the spreading of harmful mutations. This is what they are doing here, especially since mitochondrial DNA is inherited directly from the mother means that any problems will be propagated to all future generation unlike normal genes.
From this perspective, techniques that are technically eugenics, but can't feasibly be used in evil ways, are unambiguous progress. I'm wary of gene editing, but the technique described in the article doesn't seem like a slippery slope to me.
There are people who have a deep emotional need to control other people's lives and use all available tools to do that.
There are also people who don't have that need at all and would very much like to use the same tools to improve themselves or their children.
These are two separate groups but "we" are limiting the second group's access to tools in order to prevent the first group from misusing it.
In fact, some people tabooize the tools and intentionally attack even the second group for using them because they either afraid of the first group or, more often, because they are not even aware there are different types of people with different motivations and driving needs.
There is still selection going on and it is difficult to argue that it is not natural. The pressures we are exposed to are just not consistent with some idealized natural state and thus seem "unnatural".
Be careful, "natural selection" is a specific descriptor that describes a selection process that is contrasted by "artificial selection". The second one comes up from time to time in human context; we call it "eugenics".
This feels like something that's going to start well intentioned, but snowball into very strange outcomes.
Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
But that (fostering human life) is also not a settled debate if the laws in some states are any indication. But debate is hard in jurisdictions where minority opinion can hold sway (like in Florida where a referendum hit 57% for enshrining a right to abortion).
While I'm resolutely pro-choice and don't consider a fertilized cell to be "human", (before I continue I want to be clear, I 100% support these types of procedures in the article) there is eventually going to be a grey area where debate needs to happen before we hit Gattaca-style dystopian editing.
PS This is not meant to argue against your view per se, which I disagree with but respect. I mean to illustrate how very quickly this gets messy and rational debate flies out the window. But that's the same with anything political in today's climate... :-/
It seems you mean to imply that you are against the destruction of a fertilized viable embryo, but then the rest of your message seems to suggest that it isn’t that important.
How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).
Frankly, advice on having children from celibate men doesn't need special consideration from women.
I say this as someone who was at least raised Catholic and still has an affection for the faith.
https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/docume...
https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/secti...
People who have trouble naturally conceiving a child?
Where did you come from?
(the same as with pro-choicers and third trimester abortions for example)
I agree that DNA in mitochondria is much smaller than DNA in the nucleus. But in each person there are many mitochondria and they nay have slightly different DNA. And the DNA in mitochondria has a different variation than the DNA in the nucleus. So it's difficult to weight both.
Can we say 2.1 parents? A long time ago I read that most binary classifications are not completely binaries, it's just that 2 options cover almost all the cases. (Are virus alive?) I guess integer classifications also have hidden corner cases.
I also remember from a biology book that in a lab they mixed two blastula(?) of small lizards(?) or something like that. They had different skin color and the baby had patches of both colors. Does that count as 2 or 4 parents?
Are women carrying partial people in their eggs?
If most fertilized eggs naturally fail to implant then should we monitor urine and arrange funerals for those lost?
1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.
2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.
3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.
4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.
_________
[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer
DNA required by mitochondria are both in the mitochondria and in the nucleus. This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two; or the genetic distance of the donor might matter.
Still TBD whether other problems arise. If they do, I wonder if the affected person has any ability to get medical records of the other subjects, to compare diagnoses or treatments, notwithstanding privacy protections.
DNA that codes for proteins that are required by the mitochondria...
The DNA in the nucleus itself does not make its way to the mitochondria.
> This seems to show there is no co-evolution of the two
There is plenty of co-evolution between the two. But the idea that the genetic distance between donors doesn't matter is pretty substantiated by the fact that people of two races can have children.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we unbanned you because you promised you wouldn't do this kind of thing, and your account seems to have reverted to the earlier pattern. I'm not just talking about the current comment—I mean the pattern of using HN primarily to comment on political/national/religious/ideological topics. If you would please fix this so we don't have to ban you again, that would be good.
foxyv•2d ago
Another thought, what about three parent households engaging in IVF? Will this be an option to have 3 biological parents regardless of disease? How will we keep records properly? What are the legal consequences? Do mitochondrial parents need to pay child support?
thaumasiotes•6h ago
Absolutely not. This is in vitro:
>> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.
In vivo would make no sense.
Out_of_Characte•5h ago
It would certainly be one of the more stranger ways to explain the birds and the bees
perilunar•5h ago