Ignore the nonsense about 'three-parent babies': Parliament should embrace DNA treatment
Imagine that scientists made a remarkable breakthrough. Suppose they devised a new medical technique that rendered many inherited, often terminal childhood illnesses a thing of the past.
No more serious mitochondrial disease. No more mums and dads living and loving their children with the agonising knowledge their little ones will never make it to adulthood.
How would you respond to the news?
Would you rejoice in the discovery, hailing these remarkable boffins? Perhaps you’d demand government funding to make this remarkable innovation available to every family that needed it?
Or would you ban the new medical treatment?
Well British scientists have made precisely such a breakthrough. And if we are not very careful we are in danger of outlawing it.
Each year, a tiny number of children are born with a mitochondrial disorder. That is to say their mitochondrial DNA – the battery pack that powers each cell in your body – doesn’t work the way it should. The effects are devastating – many of the body’s organs don’t work, there is loss of movement and muscle weakness. Brain diseases. Heart failure.
Now, however, scientists have worked out how to prevent all that. How? They’ve devised two techniques to basically take some healthy mitochondrial DNA from a donor, and add it to the mother’s egg – or to the mother’s fertilised egg.
Ignore the nonsense headlines about “three-parent children”. Any child born as a result of this technique will still be that unique genetic blend of mum and dad, just like every other person on the planet. The only difference is that each of their cells will have a proper set of batteries, enabling that child to grow up healthy and happy.
Forget any talk about “designer babies”. Of the 20,000 to 30,000 genes in our DNA, this technique will alter a grand total of 37.
Perhaps you think the whole idea is a bit spooky? No spookier that placing into your blood stream antibodies generated in another organism to inoculate you against killer diseases.
Or maybe you think it is “playing God”? No more so than taking a heart out of one person and placing it into the body of another. If that extends and enhances human life, to the detriment of no one, which Divine Being do you imagine opposes it?
Making sure that small toddlers do not die of horrific, debilitating diseases is not eugenics. It is decent, rational and humane.
Precisely because we need to ensure that no one ever does try to create “designer babies”, government very tightly controls and regulates any medical technique involving human DNA. Parliament, quite properly, has the final say on what can and cannot be done.
In a few months, the House of Commons will have to make a choice. Should MPs vote to allow that tiny number of mums, who know they carry mitochondrial disease, have freedom to choose treatment? Or should they vote to ban it?
I have thought about it long and hard – and for me there is only one choice.
It might cost me some votes, but so be it. I will do what is right.
You see, some of those mums – and dads – are not just statistics to me. They are people I know by name. I am absolutely certain that voting to allow mums to choose treatment is morally the right thing to do. I hope that Parliament rises in defence of reason.
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