The Future is Now?

Okay, so reading a little blip one afternoon, lead me to an article in an Oxford journal called Human Reproduction. It's one of those heady, dense, highly technical, meant-for-other-researcher-types that can be found on campuses and the Internet.

So...sometimes women who're trying to get pregnant will have mitochondria in their eggs that are sluggish, and make it difficult for the egg, once fertilized, to make the trip to the uterus. Mitochondria are like the engines of every cell in our body. It's believed that mitochondria once used to be independent creatures that found benefit in living and reproducing inside of other, larger, single-celled organisms, and that this symbiosis started the process of moving on to other more advanced multi-cellular organisms and beyond. In fact, mitochondria have their own DNA, and this mitochondrial DNA has been studied and shows the approximate date that human ancestry went through a tight bottleneck--possibly a volcano eruption in Africa or something--that we as a specie were lucky to have survived.

Moving on, and back to the article...some experiments were carried out to figure out a way to help the women with sluggish mitochondria. The method described in that article was to set up a normal in-vitro process, but placing inside the embryo extra mitochondria, mitochondria from another women, in an attempt to counteract the sluggishness of the mother's own mitochondria. Got it?

The process led to 30 healthy births, up to 2001. It is not known if the research has continued, since it snuck under the radar and has tried to stay there since. Why, you might ask?

Because: this method is one of the definitions of genetically-modified humans. 30 healthy babies have been born through genetic-modification, and few know what's happened to them. Did they have the same problems the rodents had under the same experiments? Did they suffer no problems, and are living healthy lives to this day?

In the geneticist community, this research brought out the shouting match (in the stuffy scientist manner of writing letters) inherent in any controversial realm. Pretty wild.

Pretty wild, indeed. Genetically modified humans have been born. Thirty of them. Are any alive? Do they know about themselves? Do a couple of extra mitochondria mean that much?