I'm prolife. Perhaps. You're destroying one human in this process.
Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
Afaik it's a misconception that MRT necessarily involves the destruction of an embryo. The spindle transfer method transplants the mother's egg's DNA into the donor's egg before fertilization, so only one embryo is ever created. The UK trials exclusively used the older pronuclear transfer method, where two embryos are created and the donor's is destroyed, because the journey to full regulatory approval took about a decade and embryos are currently safer to freeze and thaw than eggs. In a hypothetical scenario where MRT became as widely available as IVF, this would not need to be the case for new patients.
> Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.
But that (fostering human life) is also not a settled debate if the laws in some states are any indication. But debate is hard in jurisdictions where minority opinion can hold sway (like in Florida where a referendum hit 57% for enshrining a right to abortion).
While I'm resolutely pro-choice and don't consider a fertilized cell to be "human", (before I continue I want to be clear, I 100% support these types of procedures in the article) there is eventually going to be a grey area where debate needs to happen before we hit Gattaca-style dystopian editing.
PS This is not meant to argue against your view per se, which I disagree with but respect. I mean to illustrate how very quickly this gets messy and rational debate flies out the window. But that's the same with anything political in today's climate... :-/
How so? They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed). So even if you consider life to start at conception, this is precisely just before that still, meaning there's no human being destroyed here - unless I misunderstand the biology going on (or the article is not correct).
> The eggs from both the mother and the donor are fertilised in the lab with the dad's sperm.
The article seems clear. Another comment [1] suggested it should be possible to do as you suggested but I certainly do not know the science in this space.
The article uses the colloquial definition of fertilization, i.e. that fertilization is a moment, specifically the moment the sperm enters the egg. In literature, fertilization is a ~24 hour long process instead, which kicks off when sperm meets egg, and finishes when a zygote is successfully created [0] inside. The sperm entering the egg is relatively early on during that.
The article further refers to "donor" and "parent" embryos. This is also not correct as far as I undestand, eggs turn embryos once the fertilization process completes, and a zygote is present. [1] Even this could be considered misleading as there's also an "embryo proper" which forms about a week later still, but I wanted to keep to the reference frame of the GP.
That's very interesting, thank you for the context. I imagine I learned some amount of this long ago and have lost it to disuse. I also think I agree with the majority of your analysis after reading your references as well as [1] and [2]. And I apologize for my uninformed quoting of a line from the article and appreciate the education.
I found [2] particularly informative because it outlines a multi-stage process through which an embryo goes, the earliest of which is fertilization as you described. My reading in the article, and perhaps relying too much on the artwork, seems to put the process described there at stage 1b-1c since the pronuclei looks to be in the process of fusing. My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
> They're removing the pro-nuclei before they fuse (which is when a new human, specifically their first sovereign cell and their DNA, would be formed).
I wish I'd had the context to appreciate this before my earlier reply. :)
I also enjoyed reading parts of [3] and imagine there is probably better information nearly 60 years later.
> My conclusion in cross-referencing [1] is that your "embryo proper" is around stage 4-5 and would have been implanted?
No, I believe what happened is that they made their mitochondrial changes before the pronuclei fusion, and inserted this modified egg into the womb. There it the continued on with the fertilization process, finishing up, creating the zygote, etc.
The embryo-proper bit was only relevant to the "from what point is it a human life" part of this, it is not relevant to the procedure specifically. That comes a whole week after fertilization I believe.
Being anti-abortion (what you call pro-life) doesn’t also automatically mean that you share the belief that human life and the associated rights thereof begin at the instant of fertilization.
It seems you mean to imply that you are against the destruction of a fertilized viable embryo, but then the rest of your message seems to suggest that it isn’t that important.
Some of us are a bit more comfortable with IVF-like processes because the intent is to foster human life rather than take it, just as it's acceptable to cause an abortion in the process of saving a mother.