Ethics Panel Endorses Mitochondrial Therapy, But Says Start With Male Embryos (sciencemag.org) 125
sciencehabit writes: An experimental assisted reproduction technique that could allow some families to avoid having children with certain types of heritable disease should be allowed to go forward in the United States, provided it proceeds slowly and cautiously. That is the conclusion of a report released today from a panel organized by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS), which assesses the ethics questions surrounding the controversial technique called mitochondrial DNA replacement therapy. More controversially, however, the panel recommended that only altered male embryos should be used to attempt a pregnancy, to limit the possible risks to future generations. (Males can't pass along the mitochondrial DNA that is altered in the procedure.)
Controversial? (Score:2)
Why is it controversial, exactly?
Are critics worried about the X-Men? Or are they mad because of religious rigmarole?
Re:Controversial? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it controversial, exactly?
Are critics worried about the X-Men? Or are they mad because of religious rigmarole?
Because they are creating genetically modified human beings. Currently, the technique is being looked at for certain negative conditions, but it has the potential to be used for other purposes, too. The issue of designer babies is a moral question, not a scientific one. And, moral questions are often controversial.
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Because they are creating genetically modified human beings.
All humans are the result of genetic modification, usually as a result of a technique called "sex".
The issue of designer babies is a moral question, not a scientific one.
Moral decisions should be made by individuals, not governments. As long as the procedure is technically safe (and presumably it is, since it is already legal in Britain), then the government has no business telling individuals how and when they reproduce. Keep your laws off my body.
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Re:Controversial? (Score:4, Funny)
Moral decisions should be made by individuals, not governments.
So as long as I think a murder is justified...?
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You forgot polygamy, where the state says three consenting adults can't get married...because reasons.
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Marriage, when the government is involved is a legal contract between two people and the state - this is how the state has authority over it regarding divorce, property and how individuals gain legal powers of attorney, the right to not testify in court against a spouse as the two are legally one entity, tax benefits, etc.,..
Marriage, when religion is involved, is a separate thing. In this situation, a religion can refuse to marry certain pairing and can marry other groupings like multiple people with poly
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>The state has said nothing about three people being married by a church. That marriage just wouldn't have the legal benefits.
This theory doesn't accord with actual laws on the books which practically make "married in church but not before the state" between three or more people illegal in many cases - laws like prohibiting cohabitation.
In theory these laws were passed due to the extreme patriarchally one-sided nature of most polygamous religious cultures and the frequency with which they included marryi
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I was going to mention all the federal arrests and issues in Utah before they decided to follow the federal laws, but you summed it up rather well with the description you gave.
The state (federal government) absolutely interferes in proper religiously wed polygamists. I was going to bring up the show Sister Wives, but apparently, that family has brought a striking down of the anti polygamy laws in Utah recently...I had not heard that until I started looking for citations about the harassment they received,
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"Moral decisions should be made by individuals, not governments. "
What you mean is that genetic choice should be made by individuals ('I want my babies to look like this person...') rather than by governments, in which case it's called eugenics.
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you've obviously not studied the history of eugenics, which was originally precisely an encouragement of individuals to breed more offspring with (it was hoped) good ("eu-") genes ("-genic").
Look up Francis Galton, the main founder of the movement.
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When a government espouses a particular type of genome as being the ideal and encourages or forces people to make their genetic choices toward that ideal, it's eugenics. When people make p their own minds about who to mate with, its just genetic choice.
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(Incidentally, at that time eugenics was very popular with other governments too. this was the era when the US and UK governments forcibly sterilised thousands of p
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I don't see how this differs in any way from what I said. Yes, eugenics was such a worldwide fad early in the twentieth century, like carbon warming today, that Nazism sneaked up on the world because it was just a more authoritarian, ethnospecific version of policies that most other countries already had at the time.
Or are you arguing that people should have the right to choose, as individuals, who they mate with?
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People do, at the moment, in most of the world, have some degree of choice over who they mate with and whether they have children. Of course, neithe
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Genetic modification via sex does not combine the primary genetic material of more than two parents.
Sometimes it does. A chimera [wikipedia.org] can contain genetic material from the mother, and from two different fathers.
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You seem to think I am opposed to this. I did not take a stand one way or the other. I just answered the OP's rhetorical question.
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"Moral decisions should be made by individuals, not governments."
By the time any individual is presented with these choices they've already been filtered by many much larger institutions, including in this case government, pharmaceutical corporations, university research labs, various levels of scientists, (and maybe you should include pressure brought by the media/Slashdot), so I wouldn't single out government influence for wrath as if everything else is individual choice.
It isn't a couple in the back of a
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BTW, they only "allowed" it starting in February of 2015.
Moral decisions that only affect YOU can be made by you. Moral decisions that affect others should at least be brought up with the involved parties. Moral decisions that can affect a species should be looked at by at least a representative sample of the population. In non-direct democracies (most of the civilized world), that kind of job usually is done by the existing government.
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The issue of designer babies is a moral question, not a scientific one
It isn't just that. Its also quite possible to introduce artificial genetic diseases that are not fully understood for a few generations, and by then the change will have "gone wild" in the gene pool.
Most of us software engineers wouldn't consider it wise to make a code change to a huge poorly-understood program of the "lets tweak this and see what happens" variety and then release it to production without any prior testing. They are just forbidding the genetic programming equivalent of that.
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"What could possibly go wrong"
Has nothing to do with religion. Has everything to do with Scientists ignoring Darwinism and trying to fix nature's "mistakes" without understanding they may not be mistakes after all, but Genetic Mutations for the survival of the fittest. Some mutations are bad/good, until they are proven otherwise. Like sickle cell trait is bad, but has genetic strengths against Malaria. Remove the trait, you remove the benefit the trait provides, making the species weaker.
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You had to say meat because blubbering blubber sounds redundant.
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So, you're willing to risk the entire gene pool to fix one person. Got it.
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Has everything to do with Scientists ignoring Darwinism and trying to fix nature's "mistakes" without understanding they may not be mistakes after all, but Genetic Mutations for the survival of the fittest.
That doesn't make sense and sounds a lot like the kind of interpretation of Darwinism that you would expect a hundred years ago.
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Meh, I've got a small descendant of a coelurosaurian theropod standing next to me - he's not so tough.
(Actually, I take that back - an elephant-sized predatory variant of him would be terrifying)
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Meh, I've got a small descendant of a coelurosaurian theropod standing next to me - he's not so tough.
(Actually, I take that back - an elephant-sized predatory variant of him would be terrifying)
Then again, Ostriches might look goofy, but you do not want to get kicked by one.
Complately aside, but I was once bit by an emu.
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Birds are often underrated. Cassowaries, for example, can be deadly [tumblr.com] - they attack sort of like a Deinonychus, with one "weapon claw" designed for slashing while they jump.
The old-school "lizardlike" T-rex of Jurassic Park fame hardly seems frightening at all when you compare it to what it would be like if they had given it an amazon parrot's threat display. When they get hormonal - such as when you give them a treat or mess with their "home" - they literally pulse their eyes. The pupil gets huge, then sh
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Birds are usually only non-threatening to us because they're small. But if they were huge, they'd be like monsters [tumblr.com].
Along those lines, here's an interesting NatGeo article.
http://news.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
Put feathers on most dinosaurs, and suddenly they look kinda pretty.I'm certain the artist took some liberty with the colors, but that's an intriguing painting.
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I love how we not only know that velociraptor had feathers, but exactly for example that it had on each arm exactly 14 secondary wing feathers of modern style (with rachis and barbs). We know pretty much everything except for what the color patterning was and how they actually used them ;)
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Black and brown, in various intensities? I don't see any liberties there. Those are the colours that were inferred in the first melanocyte-mapping papers from ... it was about 2005, wasn't it?
The descendants of the dinosaurs - birds, see signature - have a wide range of colours available. The other descendants of the ancestors of dinosaurs (mammals and the paraphyletic bucket called "reptiles") also have a wide rang
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Oh, by the way, related to your story: Johnny Cash was once nearly killed by an ostrich [dangerousminds.net]. ;)
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Has everything to do with Scientists ignoring Darwinism
You could make the same argument against smallpox vaccination. Or indoor plumbing.
Re:Controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)
I see you haven't looked into mitochondrial disease at all.
I knew a couple that just lost their child to it. The baby took 9 months to die, losing all bodily functions and slowly withering away, unable to obtain energy for the cells from food. A colleague of my wife lost their baby in two months to a comparable but slightly different genetic failmode, which caused the skin to fall off her body. She died in horrible agony without eyes, nose and cheeks, and black, rotting skin all over.
There are pretty compelling reasons to want to do something about this, and it's really no coincidence that the mitochondrial diseases are first in line for an attempt at a cure.
Even then, sickle cell trait may have genetic strengths against malaria, but it's a stopgap measure at best and we have much better treatments nowadays - if you can afford to get a genetic cure, you can certainly afford profylaxis and medication against malaria. This goes for many other "genetic strengths" that are mostly crippling disabilities, as well. So to me, your statement is merely a variation on the rather worn out theme that "man should not meddle with Nature".
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You're over-reacting a bit. I'd say he meant to always be aware of the law of unintended consequences when you're buggering about with shit you only know a bit about.
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>whether, in retrospect, the ethics concerns and regulations that pervade the field of medical genomics will come to be seen as stifling and detrimental.
Maybe they will, when that happens, it would likely be the right time to relax them. If we had been more cautious when we discovered pencilin we could have had almost all the lives antibiotics saved still saved, without all the people now being killed by antibiotic resistant bacteria. Severe antibiotic resistant TB is a terrifying way to die.
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Antibiotics are great, until Bacteria evolve to be resistant to them. And while it hasn't happened yet, there are indications that an outbreak of resistant bacteria might wipe out large portions of humanity.
Unintended consequences are unintended. And they often occur long after the root cause is forgotten.
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You need to be much more careful about how you say this. There isn't an antibiotic in use today to which there aren't some resistant bacteria somewhere. (There's an outbreak of resistant bacteria to the newest family of antibiotics - the ones that replace methicillins and vancomycins - in China at the moment.) What hasn't happened yet is that one bacterial strain has been resistant to all known antibiotics, and found in the wild. Yet.
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As someone who suffers from a mitochondrial problem (not as bad as the ones you describe, fortunately) I'm hopeful that eventually we will find a way to fix these problems in adults too. Recently there was some promising research that involved rebuilding the immune system, by destroying it with chemotherapy and then allowing it to recover. When it rebuilds it returns to an un-broken state, which might suggest a way to fix mitochondria too.
Re:Controversial? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a very small but non-zero chance of screwing up - introducing some unintended damage to the DNA which will go initially unnoticed, until the subject's muscles start to turn to gloop twenty years later. At least this way any screwups are contained to one individual.
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I thought it was what started Parasite Eve
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Fuck it, lets got full Kerbal and create a strain of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis that can infect humans and just get the damn zombie appocalypse over with already.
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Would you want to come in second place to a GM human? Once we start messing with humans, creating artificiality better humans and regular old normal humans, One group will need to oppress the other. Either Super humans will be banned from all Competition with regular humans, or regular Humans will naturally lose all competitions.
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How is the creation of a slave caste not only a big problem, but something you should always put a lot of consideration into before embarking on? I don't care if slavery already exists, it is still a big deal.
Also, while there exists areas like running where one genetic group dominates, none of them dominate in more than one area. Kenian's still have an average IQ of 90 or something like that. And fortunate or not, society is so far away from a meritocracy that we simply do not see the pooling of genetic ex
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How is the creation of a slave caste not only a big problem, but something you should always put a lot of consideration into before embarking on?
Wow - that escalated quickly. I'd like bones that would resist osteoarthritis, and tendons/ligaments that would be stronger, ad you're going on a planet of the Apes scenario.
Also, while there exists areas like running where one genetic group dominates, none of them dominate in more than one area. Kenian's still have an average IQ of 90 or something like that.
For crying out loud - don't go there. Because You can't tell a thing about a person's IQ just by telling us what genetic background he or she has. I don't care if the average IQ is 150, it still doesn't predict.
And fortunate or not, society is so far away from a meritocracy that we simply do not see the pooling of genetic excellence
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>Wow - that escalated quickly. I'd like bones that would resist osteoarthritis, and tendons/ligaments that would be stronger, ad you're going on a planet of the Apes scenario.
Eat properly and move your body more than scratching your ass.
Actually, I've had a long life of extreme amounts of activity. I wore myself out doing all the "Right things". I'd still be doing them if I could.
May you live to be 120 years old, and enjoy my bodilty pain every day of your life.
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Would you want to come in second place to a GM human? Once we start messing with humans, creating artificiality better humans and regular old normal humans, One group will need to oppress the other. Either Super humans will be banned from all Competition with regular humans, or regular Humans will naturally lose all competitions.
I'd love to be a GM human. All those years of playing Ice Hockey have taken their toll. The problem is that if I had to do it all over again, I would do the same thing.
Evolution is far far from perfect. Nothing wrong with tighening up a few parameters here and there.
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>Evolution is far far from perfect. Nothing wrong with tighening up a few parameters here and there.
That's because you're mistaking evolution as something that happens to a species. It is much more accurate to say that evolution is something species do to each other and one of it's most IMPORTANT outcomes is to ensure that no species is ever perfect.
Perfection is more guaranteed extinction than any flaw could be.
The perfect predator goes extinct, because none of his prey survives to produce a next genera
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Perfection is more guaranteed extinction than any flaw could be.
Your reply is nice, but I'm trying hard to parse it, because it doesn't make sense to me.
So what you are saying is that if we tweak the calcium phosphate in humans to be a little more durable, humanity will go extinct?
So tell me, let's say you have a genetic flaw like Huntingdon's You fear that gentic manipulation to avoid all of the fun you'll be going through as it kills you is bad? If not, what sort of genetic modification do you have in mind that will force extinction on humans?
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>Your reply is nice, but I'm trying hard to parse it, because it doesn't make sense to me.
Genetic flaws happen, they occur to a rare few individuals, who rarely procreate, and they have limited impact on the species as whole.
Perfection rapidly becomes dominant, and then prevents the forces of competition from keeping population growth in check - result the entire species goes extinct.
>So what you are saying is that if we tweak the calcium phosphate in humans to be a little more durable, humanity will
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>Your reply is nice, but I'm trying hard to parse it, because it doesn't make sense to me.
Genetic flaws happen, they occur to a rare few individuals, who rarely procreate, and they have limited impact on the species as whole.
We aren't eve talking about the same thing - But you are still wrong.
Perfection rapidly becomes dominant, and then prevents the forces of competition from keeping population growth in check - result the entire species goes extinct.
ANd here is why you are wrong. There is no such thing as perfection. If you look at the vagus nerve for example, in humans and mammals it is a mess. It was adapted from a gill structure, and does loops and turns in teh body to get to the throat. It's one of the many defects we h
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Sharks are perfect predators and are not in danger of going extinct. They have been around for 450 Million years.
This reminds me of anti GMO freaks, anti vaxxers and global warming deniers.
Probably is, one of those short sighted people who believe that early humans were perfect, and all we've done since is mess ourselves up.
A New Yorker cartoon says it best. http://www.damnedheretics.com/... [damnedheretics.com]
Two cavemen sitting across from each other, and one says : "Something's just not right - our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past 30."
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>Sharks are perfect predators and are not in danger of going extinct
Beeeeppp wrong.
Sharks are definitely not perfect predators, they are extremely good - but they are far from perfect. I've actually watched videos of a seal managing to win a battle for survival against a great white - swimming around him and dodging till the shark was too tired to continue pursuit. They do not always succeed.
And the reason they are so good is because that's how good they need to be to survive at all, the ocean is bloody
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Well, I think this is one of those cases where there's an umbrella rule that serve purpose, but which might also have sensible exceptions. In this case the rule is that selecting embryo sex is something that ought to be discouraged.
There are lots of reasons to discourage selecting offspring sex, some of which a reasonable person might disagree with. For example some would object that it's playing God. Others might say say that it's wrong to value persons of one sex more than others. I don't find those pa
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Personally, I think that allowing for sex selection would be a self correcting problem. In China, with the one child rule, the ratios were thrown off, this led to a lot of males with no chances of finding a wife. So the sexism of the previous generation is bred out of the society as people see the error of choosing to have primarily male offspring. Perhaps this could lead to a reduction of populations in China and the Middle east where sexism prevails as the way.
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Eventually perhaps.
However more immediately you'll get a situation where the demand for wives leads to kidnapping of girls which leads to having a female child being even less desirable as she'd probably get kidnapped and raped.
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Oh, it is self-correcting. It's just that the process of correction isn't so nice for the people who have to live through it.
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People will see the error of other people's choices. Not much chance any of them will see their own.
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Why is it controversial, exactly?
Are critics worried about the X-Men? Or are they mad because of religious rigmarole?
Depends on whether you're a Christian fundamentalist wacko or an anti-GMO wacko.
But all fears aside, this seems to be a way of beta-testing a mitochondrial fix in male embryos before making the same fix on the female side, who would then be able to pass the patch on in the human germline.
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Re:Controversial? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gender is a social construct ;)
Well it is; at least all that pink-is-for-girls, blue-is-for-boys rubbish is. People who are biologically male can wear high heels and enjoy chick flicks, but they can't pass on mitochondrial DNA, which is the relevant point here.
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High heels were originally invented for men to wear when riding horses, so sure men can wear high heels.
I can't conceive of a man enjoying a chick flick though.
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INCONCEIVABLE!!!
I can't conceive of a man enjoying a chick flick though.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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And are these understood well enough to be SURE of fixing things, on a permanent basis?
Yes
This is the cellular equivalent of an organ transplant, without the associated risks of organ rejections. Mitocondria have their own DNA separate from the Nuclear DNA. It is inherited only from the mother. In the case of a surrogate pregnancy the child is technically the offspring of all 3 parents (half of nuclear DNA from father, half of nuclear DNA from mother, and mitochondrial DNA from surrogate). All they are talking about is taking the mitochondria from someone who has no mitochondrial associate
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and mitochondrial DNA from surrogate
It depends.
Not all surrogate pregnancies work that way. A Surrogate could just be someone carrying the baby for a couple where the female has various issues preventing carrying a baby to term.
http://www.webmd.com/infertili... [webmd.com]
According to that article in fact, you are completely wrong. I have however heard of what you are speaking of, I just don't recall what it is called, but apparently it isn't surrogacy. What you speak of is the current therapy for mitochondrial disorders where they use a viable egg fr
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Passing on mitochondrial DNA (Score:3)
Males can't pass along the mitochondrial DNA that is altered in the procedure
Well, they can, it's just that sperm mitochondria usually get swamped out by egg mitochondria.
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My understanding could be wrong. Let's call it a teaching moment.
Re:Passing on mitochondrial DNA (Score:5, Interesting)
You are correct. Sperm have all of their mitochondria located by the flagellum, not spread throughout the cytoplasm of the main body, which makes sense due to the fact that the real energy expenditure in a sperm cell is going to be movement.
The mitochondria and flagellum are left behind as a distinct unit when the main body merges with the egg. So, there are no male mitochondria in the resulting fertilized egg. There could be some sort of odd condition that allows something like the sperm mitochondria to make it inside the egg, but if that happens it is not the rule, and probably means that something is wrong.
That is why you will only inherit mitochondria via the female line, which has had an interesting ability to aid in tracing human migrations through history.
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False:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2716-mitochondria-can-be-inherited-from-both-parents
http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v93/n4/full/6800572a.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v352/n6332/abs/352255a0.html
MRAs ASSEMBLE! (Score:1)
They want to do their eugenics biological experimentation on men only. It's a feminazi plot. Tuskegee all over again.
Sexist Government!!! (Score:2)
It is obvious that the female run government is just trying to replace us men with better genetic specimens.
If these women weren't so shallow this would never be happening.
Mitochondria live within us. (Score:5, Funny)
Since TFS didn't explain what "mitochondria" are, I had to look them up myself and found a documentary about them [imdb.com]. One scientist explains them as:
Mitochondria are a microscopic lifeforms that reside within all living cells. And we are symbions with them. Without the mitochondrians life could not exist and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us telling us the will of the Force.
I hope this helps.
The summary seems good on this one. (Score:1)
Good to restrict to males only (Score:2)
Mitochondrial DNA (actually more like mRNA) only passes to children from the mother's DNA contribution. So if a male has it altered, they can't pass it on to kids.
That said, it's not quite as straightforward as you might think. Chromosomal abnormalities could, theoretically, allow the sequences to pass from fathers, but most or all of the maternal mitochondrial sequences would have to not transcribe and some bizarre stuff would have to happen.
If you were going to Mars, the exposure to radiation, or some Fan
Are they altering individual haploid cells, then? (Score:2)
Unless TFA already addressed that. Not like I actually read it.
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depends on perspective, it could be considered anti male performing genetic experiments on only males.
SMASH THE MATRIARCHY 8-).