Cloning with two mothers approved

[GeraldGiraffe]

From the BBC website-

'UK scientists are granted permission to clone a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers.'

Discuss.

This is fabulous in my opinion. The best of what science and technology can offer.

completely unnatural

It's not saying that lesbians are suddenly going to be able to have babies though Jampots, it's more for parents who are both carriers/ sufferers of a particular genetic abnormality, where there is a high chance of this resulting in a baby with the same condition. Cystic fibrosis comes to mind, and the example they use in the article is muscular dystrophy.

It's actually for much more unusual conditions- they are planning to use it for diseases where the mutation isn't in the DNA in the nucleus (where about 99.9999% of it is) but in the DNA in mitochondria. It's only carried by the mother, the father's status is irrelevant. If the mother has a mitochondrial DNA mutation then the nuclear DNA will be fine, it just needs to be put into cytoplasm that is normal, as that's where the mitochondria are. They're not really mixing two women's genetic material in that sense, the child's DNA will be almost entirely from its real parents, just the extra bits in the cytoplasm from the donor. There's no other way people who are carriers of this disease can avoid passing it on, so I think it's pretty ingenious.

Dying is natural. What's so great about that? Cars aren't natural, or buses, or heart transplants, or most things we have as a matter of course today. It will save lives.

I always feel unnerved about cloning, we mess around with nature so much I think cloning as a whole is a step too far.

One day mother nature will fight back, and it wont be pretty.

Mother nature is always fighting back. What do you think MRSA is?

Really, it's not Frankenstein's monster. We aren't going to be floodded with little Hitlers everywhere. There are no cloned babies.

im glad they have given it the go ahead. as i think that often anything to do with genetics is just dissed, without any real reasonin g. tends to be very knee jerk.
lets see if they do succeed. might not work.

she's quite clever for a plumber that Tamum, ain't she?

I once really embarrassed myself saying some thing about mitochondrial DNA..

Shame I'm not a bit better at plumbing though, eh

Monkeytrousers, I would love to know how you embarrassed yourself taling about something so obscure!

I knew that some DNA was passed on only through the female line but for the life of me couldn't remember what it was called (mitochondrial!)so just went ahead and said that only DNA was passed on through he female line.

Made men redundant in every sense! If only it were true..(joke)

You only get mitochondrial DNA from your mother because there are mitochondria (they are like little power stations for the cell and provide it with usable enrgy) within the egg. There are lots of mitochonria in the sperm, but not in the bit that enters the egg. The mitochonria in sperm are all in the top bit of the tail that drops off and doesn't enter the egg, and so doen't form part of the developing embryo (zygote). So the dad's mitochonria don't end up as part of the offspring, only the mum's

Isn't Biology wonderful!?!