EXPERTS SAY LIFT 3-PARENT BABY BAN
Concerns that technique opens door to cloning
Canada should lift its criminal prohibition against the creation of so-called “threeparent” babies, genetic ethicists and fertility experts say.
The controversial technique, which involves swapping a certain type of DNA between two women’s eggs, is a “novel, promising intervention” that allows women to avoid passing on sometimes fatal inherited diseases to their children and shouldn’t be outlawed because of “misplaced apprehension” over tinkering with the human genome, according to a commentary published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada.
It is a crime in Canada to knowingly create embryos that have DNA from more than two people.
The authors argue the 13-year-old law is outdated, formed at the height of fears around cloning and that Canadians “have the right to benefit from scientific advances” under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They’re calling for a national discussion to revisit the prohibitions.
Others say we are nowhere near a consensus on whether to allow the DNAblending technique to create a human being.
The procedure is known as mitochondrial replacement therapy, or MRT. Mitochondria supply energy to virtually every cell in the body. Mutations in these power packs can cause fatal metabolic disorders in babies, as well as genetic diseases affecting the neurons and nervous system.
With MRT, the nucleus is extracted from the egg of a woman with diseased mitochondria, and injected into an “enucleated” donor egg with normal mitochondria.
The resulting embryo effectively has DNA from two mothers.
The technique is now most controversially being used to help older women get pregnant. Manhattan-based Dr. John Zhang has commercialized a form of MRT that promises to help women in their 40s have their own biological babies by shuffling their DNA into younger, fresher eggs.
The authors of the Canadian commentary argue the unorthodox procedure “is often the only possible intervention to enable the birth of a healthy, genetically related child for women who carry” mitochondrial mutations.
“The desire — and social pressure — to conceive biological children have been subjects of rich theoretical and health policy inquiry,” they write, adding the media’s portrayal of assisted-baby making techniques “has played no small part in contemporary social constructions of assisted reproduction as being antithetical to ‘natural’ processes of conception and parenting.”
Terms such as “three-parent baby,” they add, are fuelling sensationalism around MRT “and its still-experimental benefits.”
Still, they argue regulatory and criminal restrictions are encouraging the growth of reproductive medical tourism, as well as mavericks like Zhang, who is charging US$50,000 at his “Darwin Life” startup to “reverse the effects of age” on human eggs.
“We’re not advocating that anybody can do anything,” said Dr. Arthur Leader, an Ottawa fertility specialist and one of the commentary’s authors. “We’re advocating that this should be allowed to go forward. Because right now it’s impossible because of criminal law — if you do this, there are jail times and fines, period.
“We can set up an ethical framework and protect Canadians from the sorts of cowboys like Zhang.”
Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act says no person shall knowingly “alter the genome of a cell of a human being or in vitro embryo such that the alteration is capable of being transmitted to descendants.”
The Trudeau government is in the process of strengthening the act by, among other things, clarifying what expenses can be paid to egg and sperm donors. The nation’s fertility doctors want the ban on paying donors and surrogates overturned, arguing the law is driving an underground market and forcing people to import eggs and sperm from the U.S.
The government has hinted the prohibition on human genome editing may also be revisited.
Last year, the U.K. parliament voted to allow limited testing of the procedure.
Since most DNA is packaged into chromosomes within the nucleus, the mother and father provide 99.9 per cent of the total genetic material. The remainder — 0.1 per cent — comes from the egg donor, “so, it’s small,” Leader said.
“People might say we don’t know what the impact of the change is on the children born,” he said. “What we’re saying is, this is one of many discoveries and techniques that are coming, and we don’t have a framework whereby we can say whether we should or shouldn’t do it.”
Others say the ban on human germ line editing should stand, arguing it would be irresponsible to proceed without strong societal consensus.
“At the present time, there is no such consensus,” bioethicists Francoise Baylis and Alana Cattapan wrote in a submission to Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor last month. Both UNESCO and the Council of Europe prohibit it.
“We’re not really talking about saving lives that exist already,” said Cattapan, an assistant professor at the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan.
“We’re talking about creating new lives that are free of disease, and there are other ways we can achieve that objective where we’re not prioritizing strong genetic relationships,” she said, such as using a surrogate or egg donor.
WE’RE TALKING ABOUT CREATING NEW LIVES THAT ARE FREE OF DISEASE, AND THERE ARE OTHER WAYS WE CAN ACHIEVE THAT OBJECTIVE.