photo courtesy of Scientific American

We’ve genetically modified bacteria, plants, and animals with great success…are humans next? 

This week the FDA held advisory meetings to discuss the safety and effectiveness of a new method of conception: three-parent in vitro fertilization.

In essence, this method would take the eggs of two women and the sperm of one man in order to produce a baby. The purpose would be to prevent inherited mitochondrial diseases. A woman would be able to birth a child without passing on her defective mitochondrial DNA. 

So what is the problem? Any parent would want their child to be born free of things like blindness and epilepsy, right? 

Well, as in any emerging medical procedure, there are ethical issues to be addressed. 

Many critics of this procedure believe it will lead to the creation of “designer babies.” They believe that if this process is adopted then we will be one step closer to altering things like height or intelligence in children. 

Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, has gone as far as to claim that this procedure will introduce:

“a regime of high-tech consumer eugenics” and be “the first time a government body had okayed genetic changes for humans and their descendants.”

On the other side, Phil Yeske, chief science officer for the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation, stated that: 

“In my mind, its not eugenics, it’s affording potential for women affected by mitochondrial disease to have a healthy child.”

Where do you stand? Is three-parent in vitro fertilization a promising medical advancement? Or does it remind you of something you’d see in Brave New World?