Should Persons Affected by Mitochondrial Disorders Not be Brought Into Existence?
By Professor Calum MacKellar,
BioNews
| 01. 06. 2014
Untitled Document In their article entitled
Is mitochondrial replacement therapy eugenic and incompatible with human dignity? in BioNews 733, John Appleby, Professor Rosamund Scott and Professor Stephen Wilkinson respond to a
written declaration by 34 parliamentarians from 13 of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe which opposed intentional heritable modifications (1).
This declaration stated that 'the creation of children with genetic material from more than two progenitor persons, as is being proposed by the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority [HFEA], is incompatible with human dignity and international law' (2). The parliamentarians were concerned that the UK Government may be about to legalise maternal spindle transfer (MST) and pronuclear transfer (PT), which are forms of germline modifications for mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) disorders which involve the transfer of chromosomes between unfertilised or fertilised eggs respectively (3).
Read more...
Related Articles
By Katherine Long, Ben Foldy, and Lingling Wei, The Wall Street Journal | 12.13.2025
Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right.
Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
A Chinese billionaire was seeking parental...
By Sarah A. Topol, The New York Times Magazine | 12.14.2025
The women in House 3 rarely had a chance to speak to the women in House 5, but when they did, the things they heard scared them. They didn’t actually know where House 5 was, only that it was huge...
By Courtney Withers and Daryna Zadvirna, ABC News | 12.03.2025
Same-sex couples, single people, transgender and intersex West Australians will be able to access assisted reproductive technology (ART) and surrogacy, almost a decade after reforms were first promised.
The landmark legislation, which removes the requirement for people to demonstrate medical...
By Rachel Hall, The Guardian | 11.20.2025
Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.
Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility...
