'Manufactured' Babies May Soon Be a Reality
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In a world where egg harvesting, gestational surrogacy, genetic selection, and now mitochondrial replacement — aka “three-parent babies,” given final approval in Britain on Tuesday — are realities, it’s not quite as easy as it used to be to find shock value in newfangled IVF methods. But news of yet another fertility breakthrough has been getting attention this week, with some saying it will allow same-sex couples to “manufacture” biological babies.
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“It has already caused interest from gay groups because of the possibility of making egg and sperm cells from parents of the same sex,” Jacob Hanna, an Israeli scientist collaborating on the project with Cambridge University professor Azim Surani, told the U.K.’s Sunday Times. He said it could become possible to use the technique to create a baby in just two years.
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The latest research has found it possible to create primordial germ cells — cells that will go on to become egg and sperm — by using human embryonic stem cells, explains a Cambridge University press release. “Although this has already been done using rodent stem cells, the study, published [in December] in the journal Cell, is the first time this has been achieved efficiently using human stem cells.”
Surani, a professor of physiology and reproduction who was involved in the research behind the creation of the first “test tube baby” Louise Brown in the 1970s, could not be reached for comment. But a Cambridge University spokesperson tells Yahoo Parenting that the same-sex baby idea is “pretty hypothetical.” He adds, “Professor Surani doesn’t want to get drawn into this debate, as it was not what he was looking at, nor the point of his research. Even if such an advance were technically possible, such a development would pose significant ethical and social questions.” What the research was primarily about, he notes, was “about understanding how egg and sperm cells are created, with implications for our understanding of infertility and germ cell tumors, which can lead to rare cases of ovarian cancer.”
The findings may also allow scientists to erase genetic mutations. “We have also discovered that one of the things that happens in these germ cells is that epigenetic mutations, the cell mistakes that occur with age, are wiped out,” Surani told the Sunday Times.“That means the cell is regenerated and reset, so while the rest of the cells in the body have aged and contain genetic mistakes, these ones don’t. We can’t say no mutations are passed on, but mostly it doesn’t happen.”
Hanna, while acknowledging the possibility of same-sex reproduction based on the research, also admitted he was troubled by the topic. “I am not in favor of creating engineered humans, and the social and ethical implications … need to be thought through,” he told the Sunday Times, “but I am very confident it will work and will be very relevant to anyone who has lost their fertility through disease.”
Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit bioethics organization, is uncomfortable with scientists and others differentiating between who is and who is not suitable for using fertility advances — pitting gay families who want to reproduce, for example, against those who are infertile through disease. But in addition, she tells Yahoo Parenting, there is a danger of these types of advances — which she views as “biologically risky” because so much is unknown about the safety risks — playing on public sympathies and “being used as bait.”
Surani’s latest findings and others that alter genes or the expression of genes, such as mitochondrial replacement, are “often presented as just another form of IVF,” Darnovsky explains. “But IVF uses evolved biological mechanisms, and is not trying to bypass millions of years of evolution.” She adds, “There are reasonable things you can learn by studying this. But applying it and rushing to even speculate about applying it is dangerous. The safety issue is huge.”
She notes that it’s not the first time headlines have touted the idea of “same-sex babies”: In 2008, when scientists at the University of Newcastle announced they had coaxed bone marrow cells from women to be turned into sperm precursor cells, some media outlets celebrated the possibility of “female sperm.” But, Darnovsky wrote at the time, “The news accounts and enthusiasts haven’t raised the question of whether equality can be engineered in a test tube or discrimination solved with a technical fix. Nor have they pointed out that procreation with artificial gametes would be a biologically extreme measure that would pose enormous risks to any resulting children.”
In any event, the reality of the latest scientific findings being implemented, for now, appears to be firmly fixed in the future. While the research gives “a new explanation of one [element] of human biology,” Nobel-prize winning scientist Sir Martin Evans told the Sunday Times, “until it is applied for a practical purpose it is only a small incremental step.”
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