MITOCHONDRIA, GENETIC ENGINEERING, ETHICS: is there a conflict?

Linda points to a 2 million year old camel tooth she discovered whle hiking in the desert.

Yes, camels originated in North America, then migrated, and went extinct here

Where is that tooth located?  I'll never tell..

It hit 91 in Borrego Springs today.  I did my walk early in order to avoid the worst of the heat.  The desert I walk through not surprisingly is nearly devoid of trees, and thus of shade.  If it is 91 in the shade, you can bet it is a hell of a lot hotter in the sun.  That’s why I have been getting my exercise in the early morning, before breakfast.  Fortunately, it is supposed to drop to more tolerable temperatures later this week.  I suspect that those of you in Bellingham (and Eureka) would trade your wet, windy 50-degree weather for a little Borrego sunshine – not to mention those of you in Michigan, either digging out of a snowstorm or preparing to do so.  Only blog followers in Chile would be content to stay put; it is early spring there.  I can’t predict how my loyal readers in Latvia would feel –the blog has suddenly developed a following there, according to the Google blogspot “hit-counter”. Go figger!  Anyway, I will fly back to Bellingham on November 16^th and stay there through the holidays.  I should get my fill of PNW gloom pretty easily.

You will be excited to learn that I have finished the CITI exams and am nearly ready to be accepted as a volunteer with the MRC (Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research.) I still have a fat form to fill out and an interview to survive, but I should be okay.  My career in unskilled clerical labor is about to launch!

Okay, about mitochondria.  You may know what these things are.  They are “organelles”, meaning tiny sacks of stuff, floating around in most human cells.   Their primary function is to act as dynamos, converting the energy in carbohydrate molecules obtained from the food and alcohol we consume – into an energy-form suitable for driving cellular processes.  Without functional mitochondria, we die.  Interestingly, mitochondria are inherited only from the mother.  Equally interesting is that they have their own genes: only a few dozen or so compared to the several tens of thousands contained in the nuclear genome – but they still have them.  What these mitochondrial genes do I haven't much of  a clue; if I ever find out I will put it in a “comment” to this blurb.  You may have heard of “Eve”, the Ur-mother of us all and chief fact supporting the “out of Africa” hypothesis about where we all came from.  She was deduced from analysis of patterns of variation in mitochondrial DNA.

Anyway, there are some nasty diseases associated with damage to mitochondrial genes; the list is very long, and depressing.  British scientists, however, have shown that hereditary mtDNA diseases can be prevented by transplanting healthy genes into the mother’s mitochondria.  The resulting offspring would have, in effect, two mothers.  However, as the maternal nuclear DNA would all be donated from the lady who will raise the kid, nobody but the parents and a whole lab-full of biologists would ever know.  The method needs testing – and therein lies the problem.

Britain, the U.S., and probably every other country that know how to make laws, prohibit “genetic engineering” as applied to human beings.  God, don’t I know it – the two CITI courses I just suffered through talked about the ethics of things like that until I felt like pulling out my sparse but precious crop of hair!  In a sense, this is “human genetic engineering”.  It also is a potential medical breakthrough that promises hope and eventual relief to lots of unfortunate people.  So once again there is a conflict between medical progress and strongly held ethical beliefs.  The Economist – from which I got some of this information - says that this dispute must be resolved in favor of continued research.  I agree.