In 2016, Zhang and a joint team of scientists from Mexico and New York used the spindle transfer technique to help a Jordanian woman give birth to a baby boy. The mother had Leigh`s disease and already had four miscarriages and two children who had died from the disease. [34] Valery Zukin, director of the Nadiya clinic in Kiev, Ukraine, reported in June 2018 that doctors used the pronuclear MRI transfer method to help four women give birth (three boys and one girl) and three women get pregnant (one from Sweden); The team had 14 unsuccessful attempts. [35] In January 2019, it was reported that seven babies were born by MRI. [36] The doctors initially received approval from an ethics committee and examination board of the Ukrainian Society of Reproductive Medicine[37][38] and the Ukrainian Academy of Postgraduate Medicine under the auspices of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine; [35] There was no law against MRI in Ukraine. One of the first children, a boy, was born in January 2017 to a 34-year-old woman, and genetic test results were reported as normal. [39] [40] In August and October 2017, the UK HFEA approved MRI for two women with a genetic mutation in their mitichondria that causes myoclonic epilepsy with tattered red fibres. [41] In January 2019, Embryotools, Barcelona, Spain, reported that a 32-year-old Greek woman had become pregnant using the spindle transfer technique. MRI was not legal in Spain, so they had sued in Greece, where there was no law against MRI.
They were supported by the Institute of Life in Athens, Greece, and had received approval from the Greek National Agency for Assisted Reproduction. Mitochondrial DNA is only passed from mother to child and is therefore inherited differently from nuclear DNA. Mitochondrial replacement (MRI) technology with donor mitochondria is a potential treatment for mitochondrial disorders, but it involves genetic modification and raises safety concerns. Several factors have contributed to the current MRI regulatory landscape in the United States. Research in the field of mitochondrial transfer has been influenced by the (negative) experience of the United States with the use of cytoplasmic transfer in the 1990s. This technology was developed to help women with repeated implantation failures and involved injecting a small amount of cytoplasm, including mitochondria, from a young, healthy donor into the mother-to-be`s egg. Although the exact number of children born using this technique is unknown and lost to follow-up, the use of this technique was stopped after two children were born with a chromosomal abnormality and one of them was diagnosed with a pervasive developmental disorder.24 Before the development of MRI and in places where it is not legal or feasible, Reproductive options for women who are at risk of transmission of mtDNA disease and want to prevent transmission were the use of another woman`s egg, adoption or childlessness. [1]:45 A parental decree is a statement that allows non-genetically related parents to have legal status as parents under surrogacy contracts.
Experts have described the decision to initially limit MRI to male embryos as “an elegant solution to germline transmission problems”,29 but it raises “a number of entirely new ethical and legal issues”30 that were not fully addressed in the NAS report. Limiting MRI to male embryos eliminates the fears associated with transferring the unwanted side effects of MRI to future generations, since mitochondria are only passed down through the maternal line. However, the thorny issues raised by this solution include the fate of female embryos and the consequences of an “obligation for the FDA to require parents to do sex selection.”31 MRI has been associated with a number of terms, some of which have positive implications such as “mitochondrial gene therapy”, “mitochondrial donation”, “life-saving treatment” (Ravitsky et al., 2015), “stories of hope” (Herbrand & Dimond, 2017), while others have had negative effects, such as “Three-parent baby”, “Three-person baby”, “three-person DNA” (Gonzalez-Santos et al., 2018), “Slippery slope” (Carr, 2015), “Designer babies” (Kaur & Nagpal, 2017). As mentioned earlier, the term third parent name for mitochondrial donors is very misleading and absurd (Dimond and Stephens, 2017). It is the central DNA around which the whole concept of genetic identity and personality of the child revolves, since the first is the one that has a profound impact on the second, not mitochondrial DNA. See OECD, note 21 above. See, however, Adashi and Cohen, op. cit. Cit. note 4, p.
834, which highlight the different regulatory and legal paradigms in the United States and the United Kingdom.
