'Three-person embryos' to combat genetic diseases: your reaction?

[HelenMumsnet]

Some of you may have seen this news story about British scientists possibly becoming the first to offer new treatments for incurable genetic diseases that would involve babies being born with DNA from three people.

We thought you might like to have a butcher's at our rather excellent Q&A about it all.

And, as ever, please do share your thoughts about it all here.

[trustissues75]

Mini - have you actually gone and read about this subject at all? In all the cases I have read about the parent's haven't even HEARD of the condition before their child has gotten sick..so how could they possibly know? The only way to solve that problem is for couples to undergo complete genetic profiling before getting pregnant - I can really see the NHS coughing up for that....

[lljkk]

I think you can extend same argument to state that medical intervention should never be used for anything.
It's a free country, folk can make their own decisions about taking such chances. You can hoik judgey pants or you can offer them an alternative.

[OddBoots]

The more we know about our DNA the more we know it is a long way from being all of the story. Our epigenome (simply speaking things that turn sections of our DVA on and off depending on our environment, some of which is passed on to future generations) plays a much more significant role in how we develop than we imagined just a few years ago.

It is worth having the discussion about this and its social implications and I'm sure this method will be regarded as a crude and non-precise technique in the future but for the benefits it could bring it is not an unreasonable medical advance.

[StiffyByng]

Most children die of severe mitochondrial disease before their fifth birthday, very often in their first year. If you'd like to say to those parents that they just resign themselves to having dodgy genes and stick a condom on, when science offers them a way to have children who will not die, then go ahead.

Hopefully stem cell research will also lead us to the possibility of effective treatment for mitochondrial disease. Also a controversial issue for some. Genetic research is galloping ahead in this area. In just two years for example it moved from diagnosis via muscle biopsy that couldn't necessarily prove anything and couldn't give you much information on the type of disease, and which took months to grow, to diagnosis of precise genetic dysfunction from a swab. Progress like this is incredibly heartening.

[Januarymadness]

MtDNA is inherited solely from the mother. Would I be correct on saying that mitochodrial illnesses are down to mutations? so basically if you took MtDNA from a relation on the same female line you would just be giving the egg the MtDNA it should have had?

[trustissues75]

January - there are instances where it can be inherited from the father - not sure how, when or why, don't know enough about it really - but that's an interesting thought.

[StiffyByng]

The problem with that would be finding someone on the female line without a mutation. The tricky thing about mitochondrial mutations is that they affect everyone differently so one person can die from it, a sibling could be chronically ill and a third unaffected. Random testing in the US suggests that 1 in 10 people has some mitochondrial disfunction-far fewer than ever know about it. Increasingly diseases are being linked to mitochondria that were previously not viewed in that way. There is thinking for example that there might be a link to ME.