Immoral Scaremongering About Designer Babies in the New York Times

Leftwing bioconservative Marcy Darnovsky
who heads up the Center for Genetics and Society has an op-ed in
today’s New York Times decrying “Genetically
Modified Babies.” In this case, she is fulminating about a

Food and Drug Administration technical meeting to consider an
in vitro fertilization technique in which defective mitochondria in
a woman’s eggs are replaced with healthy ones from another woman.
Mitochondria which function as cellular power plants have their own
small genomes outside of the nuclei of cells. Children inherit
their mitochondria from their mothers and between 1,000 to 4,000
children per year are born with diseases arising from defects in
their mitochondria.

The FDA panel is considering approval of a procedure in which
defective mitochondria in a woman’s eggs are replaced with healthy
mitochondria derived from eggs donated by another woman. The goal
is for a woman to bear genetically related children who will be
free of inherited mitochondrial disease.

Bioluddite Darnovsky objects that…

…these procedures are deeply problematic in terms of their
medical risks and societal implications. Will the child be born
healthy, or will the cellular disruptions created by this
eggs-as-Lego-pieces approach lead to problems later on? What about
subsequent generations? And how far will we go in our efforts to
engineer humans?…

…many scholars, scientists and policy makers have urged a
different approach: We should carefully and thoughtfully apply the
tools of human genetic engineering to treat medical conditions in
people, but we should not use them to manipulate the genetic traits
of future children. Genetic modifications of sperm, eggs and early
embryos should be strictly off limits. Otherwise, we risk venturing
into human experimentation and high-tech eugenics.

Unfortunately, there are now worrisome signs that opposition to
inheritable genetic modifications, written into law by dozens of
countries, according to our count, may be weakening. British
regulators are also considering mitochondrial manipulations, and
proponents there, like their counterparts in the United States,
want to move quickly to clinical trials.

The mitochondrial replacement technique is not at all “deeply
problematic.” In fact, the FDA panel has finally gotten around to
considering a technique that the agency banned after essentially
the same procedure was being successfully deployed by team led
by fertility researcher Jacques Cohen 13 years ago.

Cohen used the technique to help women to give
birth to 20 children before the FDA shut down his work in 2001.
At a conference some years later, I asked Cohen how the children
were faring and he told me that 19 were healthy and one has an
autism disorder. As it happens, some research finds
a correlation between mitochondrial dysfunction and some cases of
autism.

Just as the claque of timorous bioethicists always insist, the
FDA banned Cohen’s research – in this case for 13 years – in order
for “society”  to consider its “social and ethical”
dimensions. In the meantime, thousands of mothers who otherwise
might have been helped to bear healthy children now must watch as
their kids
suffer and die prematurely from mitochondrial diseases.

How very moral!