<
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1312708.stm>
is a BBC page from 2001.
On Wednesday, July 18, 2012 2:42:59 AM UTC+1, Richard Norman wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Jul 2012 18:10:53 -0700 (PDT), "Robert Carnegie: Fnord: cc
> talk-orig
...@moderators.isc.org" <rja.carne
...@excite.com> wrote:
> >On Wednesday, July 18, 2012 12:24:51 AM UTC+1, Metspitzer wrote:
> >> Last year, Professor Cohen said that his expertise would allow him to
> >> clone children --a prospect treated with horror by the mainstream
> >> scientific community.
> >>
> >> &#39;It would be an afternoon&#39;s work for one of my students,&#39; he said,
> >> adding that he had been approached by &#39;at least three&#39; individuals
> >> wishing to create a cloned child, but had turned down their requests
> >>
> >> Read more:
> >> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-43767/Worlds-GM-babies-born.h...
> >
> >OMIGOD LOOK AT THEM!
> >
> ><http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8220553.stm>
> >
> >Funny, the story mentions the BBC but isn't mentioned /by/ the BBC
> >News web site, unless it's very old (there is no date) or a hoax.
> >The latest mention of mitochondria disease from the BBC is in June
> ><http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18393682>
> >"The UK's Nuffield Council on Bioethics said the technique could free
> >children from 'very severe and debilitating disorders'."
> >
> >The Mail journalist seems to be wildly confused about "the germline".
> >Mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA are separate.
> THe work is now 11 years old. See
> Mitochondria in human offspring derived from ooplasmic
> transplantation: Brief communication
> Jason A. Barritt, Carol A. Brenner, Henry E. Malter and
> Jacques Cohen
> Human Reproduction 1(3) 513-516 (2001)
> http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/3/513.short
> The abstract is where the "germiline" bit comes from. It says: "This
> report is the first case of human germline genetic modification
> resulting in normal healthy children."
> It also says: "Ooplasmic transfer from fertile donor oocytes into
> potentially compromised recipient patient oocytes has led to the birth
> of nearly 30 babies worldwide. Cytoplasmic transplantation has caused
> apprehension, since the mixing of human ooplasm from two different
> maternal sources may generate mitochondrial (mt) heteroplasmy (both
> recipient and donor mtDNA) in offspring. ... Heteroplasmy was found in
> the blood from each of the children."
Looking more closely at the BBC 2009 monkey story seems to answer my question:
"US researchers have previously tried and failed to correct this
defect by adding healthy donated mitochondria into the eggs of
patients wishing to have children.
"But these attempts resulted in birth defects - probably because
mitochondria are so delicate that they are damaged when they are
transplanted from one egg to another.
"As a result, the treatment was banned by the US until it could be
demonstrated that it was safe in animal experiments."
The new technique seems to be to move nuclear DNA into a donor cell
instead of moving mitochondria and mitochondrial DNA.
It occurs to me that the other way, there were bad mitochondria
still in the cell, as well as the introduced good ones.
I still wonder why this wasn't, for instance, on Jacques Cohen's
Wikipedia page, as far as I saw. Censorship?
And is this reading correct?
