Friends star: When I was at school I beat up Trudeau
Friends star Matthew Perry has revealed he once beat up Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister.
The actor has recalled being at school with Trudeau, whose father, Pierre, was the leader of the country at the time.
“I was reminded of this — my friend Chris Murray who was also in the fifth grade — we actually beat up Justin Trudeau,” Perry said on Jimmy Kimmel’s chat show.
“We both beat him up. I think he was excelling in a sport that we weren’t, so it was pure jealousy.”
The actor and Trudeau both attended Rockcliffe Park elementary, a public school located in a wealthy area of Ottawa.
Perry said he was “not proud” of the incident.
“I’m not bragging about this, this is terrible. I was a stupid kid,” he said.
However, he joked that he could have been instrumental in Trudeau’s rise to Canada’s highest office.
“I think I was rather instrumental in him going to such great heights and becoming the Prime Minister,” he joked.
“I think he said, you know, ‘ I’m going to rise above this and I’m going to become prime minister’.”
Trudeau’s office said they had no comment. Britain’s Newcastle University says its scientists have received a licence to create babies using DNA from three people to prevent women from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their children — the first time such approval has been granted.
The license was granted by the country’s fertility regulator, according to the university.
In December, British officials approved the “cautious use” of the techniques, which aim to fix problems linked to mitochondria, the energy- producing structures outside a cell’s nucleus. Faulty mitochondria can result in conditions including muscular dystrophy and major organ failure.
“Mitochondria diseases can be devastating for families affected and this is a momentous day for patients,” said Doug Turnbull, director of the research at Newcastle University. The university has said it is aiming to treat up to 25 patients a year.
To help women with mitochondria problems from passing them on to their children, scientists remove the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and insert it into a donor egg from which the donor DNA has been removed. This can happen before or after fertilisation.
The resulting embryo ends up with nucleus DNA from its parents but mitochondrial DNA from a donor. The DNA from the donor amounts to less than 1 per cent of the resulting embryo’s genes.