It gets wierder...

Yesterday, I commented on the research where two female mice together had baby mice without a father. I've communicated with three geneticists on some of the implications of this, and my head is starting to spin. Let me see if I can keep this straight:

Background:
In the experiment, researchers genetically-altered the DNA of a female mouse embryo, grew it to adulthood and combined its eggs (carrying the genetic modification) with a normal mouse eggs (with no genetic modification) and created the first mammal born with two mothers and no father.

Questions:
I asked my geneticist friends two questions--

First, would the eggs from a genetically-altered mammal be able to be fertilized by sperm or would they only be able to develop if merged with an egg?

Answer - it depends on the type of genetic modification made. If one type of modification was made, then it could be the case that all the eggs would be limited to developing only if merged with non-altered female eggs. Such a mammal could not mate with a male unless the genetic alteration was undone by another genetic intervention.

If a different type of genetic alteration was made (a more likely alteration I'm told), then the eggs would be 50/50--half could be mated with a male and half with a female.

Second, I asked whether this could be possible to do in humans.

Answer, possibly, but it will take a while to figure out how, and anyone who attempted to do it would be crazy as we have no idea what kind of problems will develop from such a genetic alteration. (It was noted that such genetic changes are rather difficult to do, so it would be more desirable--from a practical standpoint--to try to successfully do this with chemical rather than a genetic alteration.)

Implications:
It seems to me that the implications of applying this to humans are this:

First, we know there are people and scientists who are willing to try human reproductive cloning even though we have never had a normal animal clone. Just as there are crazy people willing to experiment with cloning, I believe there are people crazy enough to try this.

Article Author: mcconchie

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