Fertility / Criticism of the experiment in China: a far-reaching step on the way to human cloning
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Chinese scientists have created a fertilized egg from two women's eggs and a man's sperm. The details of the experiment were presented at a fertility conference held in San Antonio, Texas. The production of the egg was conducted in an attempt to help a 30-year-old Chinese woman with fertility problems. The scientists believe that the technique they developed could benefit women whose eggs are not healthy enough to have a healthy pregnancy. But critics attacked the experiment and accused the scientists of going too far on the subject of human cloning.
According to the scientists from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the woman in whom the experimental egg was implanted had previously undergone two failed fertilization treatments due to problems with her eggs. The scientists tried to overcome the problem by fusing an egg of the treated woman with an egg of another woman. Each egg has nuclear material that contains most of the DNA, as well as an envelope material that surrounds the nucleus - the cytoplasm.
The scientists removed the material containing the DNA from the egg donor and left only the shell material. After that, the patient's nuclear material was injected into the shell of the donor mother in a process called - human nuclear material transfer. In this way, five mixed eggs were created. Three of these eggs were fertilized with the sperm, and implanted in the woman's uterus.
After a month of pregnancy, the doctors aborted one fetus to give the other two a greater chance of survival, however the woman aborted the remaining two when they were only four and five months old. The scientists claimed that the death of the fetuses was not related to the fertilization technique they used, but as a result of complications that sometimes exist in multiple pregnancies.
The technology behind the Chinese experiment was developed in the US. However, the scientists there stopped their work after the US Food and Drug Administration demanded that experiments on fetuses be stopped. China has also now announced that it intends to outlaw fetal research. In the UK, this technique is already banned.
Dr. Mohammed Terenisi, from the Center for Reproduction and Gynecology in London, said that the technology is familiar to him. "If you look at it from a purely medical point of view, the method can help women with reproductive problems," he said, "but from an ethical point of view, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable using this method. It's not something I would want to try."
Controversial fertilization: a baby with 3 parents
By Yuval Dror
Yesterday, at the fertility conference being held in San Antonio in the USA, Chinese doctors presented details of a medical experiment, in the framework of which a procedure was carried out that was banned in many countries, on the grounds that it was taking too big a step on the way to human cloning. The result of the controversial procedure was the birth of babies, with genetic baggage from three parents; The babies died a short time later.
The procedure has been banned for human experimentation in the USA and the UK, and in China it is no longer allowed. According to Dr. Yitzhak Berlovich, the Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Health, in Israel they refrain from approving the procedure not necessarily because of the moral problems, but because of the uncertainty involved.
The purpose of the procedure is to solve a problem that exists in some women in the egg shell (cytoplasm) and that may prevent the development of a normal pregnancy. This was the problem of a 30-year-old Chinese woman. The doctors, led by John Zhang from the Sun Yi Sun School of Medicine in China, took a donor egg and separated from it the nucleus containing the genetic material. So they inserted into the shell the nucleus taken from the treated woman's egg, and created a "new egg" through electrical stimulation that led to the fusion of the nucleus inside the shell.
Later, the doctors fertilized the egg with sperm taken from the father and grew five embryos in a dish for 48 hours, until they were inserted into the mother's uterus. Of the five, three survived, and about a month after the beginning of the pregnancy, it was decided to artificially abort one of the fetuses to increase the chance of survival of the remaining twins. However, according to Zhang, the twins also did not survive after the woman gave birth to them too early (at the 24th week and the 29th week) due to a pregnancy complication.
Dr. James Griffo, who developed the method and tried it in 1998 on several women, who nevertheless did not become pregnant, said that the fact that the woman miscarried her fetus was not related to the medical procedure she underwent. "We do not see this case as a success due to the result," he said, "but we are happy to hear that the embryos created as a result of the procedure led to pregnancy and were genetically and morphologically normal."
In an interview with the "New York Times" newspaper, Grifo criticized the opponents of the method, who claim that parts of it are identical to the process of cloning humans. According to him, "Cloning is the creation of a copy of a person who already exists. In this procedure, the nucleus is transferred from egg to egg. Although this is one of the stages of cloning, it makes it possible to create a new baby and not a copy of a person. There is no need to even talk about the two procedures in the same trial."
Despite Griffo's anger, some argue that in this process there is more hidden than visible. According to Prof. Eyal Schiff, Director of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Sheba Hospital, although the egg shell of the donor is apparently used only as a receptacle for the mother's nucleus, the shell contains genetic components. "The cytoplasm contains mitochondrial factors (bodies that provide energy to the cell), which as far as is known have a genetic contribution. As doctors, it is not clear to us what the exact balance between the nucleus and the cytoplasm is, and these question marks must be clarified before proceeding to conduct experiments on humans," he said.
According to Berlovich, such techniques should be discussed in the National Committee for Human Experiments, the "Supreme Helsinki Committee", headed by the Director General of the Ministry of Health, Dr. Boaz Lev. According to Berlovich, the committee discusses each case individually and as far as he knows, a request to carry out a procedure similar to the one carried out in China was previously rejected by the committee.
One fetus - three parents
The experiment was carried out at a university in China * due to international criticism, it was banned from being carried out again
Alex Doron
Sometimes a pair of parents is not enough. Scientists "put together" the eggs of an infertile woman, with eggs taken from a donor and fertilized them. The new scientific achievement, which raises many moral questions, was revealed yesterday by the Chinese research team.
A woman who was considered barren became pregnant through an experimental technique of in vitro fertilization. The research team reported yesterday at a scientific conference in Texas, USA that the eggs were taken from a 30-year-old patient whose fertility treatments had failed until now, and a healthy donor. In a process called "nuclear transfer", the genetic material was removed from the donor's egg, and the nucleus of the patient's egg carrying the genetic load was implanted inside it.
The eggs were fertilized and then the embryo cells were separated, and a new embryo was formed from each cell. A total of five embryos were created from three parents, and three of them were implanted in the patient's uterus. After a month of pregnancy, the researchers had to perform an abortion and one fetus was removed, to give the other two a better chance to survive.
Unfortunately, however, two premature births of the fetuses occurred in the fourth and fifth months of pregnancy, and both fetuses died. The doctors claimed that the early births were not the result of the in vitro fertilization, but complications of the multiple pregnancy.
The experiment was severely criticized in the world, for the moral-ethical problematic that exists in its execution. He was said to be "the closest possible to human cloning", which is prohibited according to laws that currently exist in many countries around the world. And now the entire procedure is banned in China, like any experiment on human embryos.
The idea of "combining" two eggs in such a process was brought up in the past in the United States, and the developers of the method thought it would be beneficial for women with defects in the eggs, but following the criticism of the method, its implementation was banned. "Even if from a purely medical-scientific point of view, the procedure may provide a solution for women who have difficulty achieving pregnancy and childbirth, it is forbidden to mix genetic material from three different people to create a fourth person," said one of the heads of British fertility medicine.
He knew genetic medicine
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