Sabrina Maddeaux: Sci fi aside, three-parent babies is the latest designer baby fad — and just as harmful

From Frankenstein to Brave New World, Gattaca and Blade Runner, attempts to genetically engineer humans results in disastrous social and political consequences, if not outright bloodshed. Perhaps the only thing worse than genetically engineering humans is genetically engineering velociraptors. The moral of the story is always the same: It’s best not to mess with the facts of life.

Since the procedure replaces DNA outside of the nucleus, mitochondrial replacement isn’t considered gene editing, but rather genetic manipulation. The resulting child still contains over 99 per cent of the traditional mother’s and father’s DNA, with a teensy-tiny amount of a third woman’s DNA. “What kind of impact will this have on the child? What types of questions is this child going to have? How are we going to provide the child with those answers? Is it safe?” asks Sherry Levitan, a Toronto-based fertility lawyer who sits on the board of directors of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society .

In 2016, the first three-parent child was born in Mexico under the care of Dr. John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City. The child’s mother carried mitochondria with mutations that can cause Leigh Syndrome, which resulted in the deaths of her first two children. The procedure and birth took place in Mexico because MRT is also illegal in the U.S.

“There haven’t been any documented side effects so far, but because this is a new technology, we can’t be certain,” explains Stacey Hume, a molecular geneticist and associate professor in medical genetics at the University of Alberta. “We won’t really know until these children grow up and have undergone studies years later to find out if they’re still healthy.”

Anything with an odd number is going to cause a problem eventually.

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