Science and Technology Committee

Again, in this scenario it is difficult to see why a future child should be exposed to potential risks of identity problems and medical complications, when there are simpler and proven techniques available. Insemination with donor sperm would allow the woman to still have a genetic tie to the child, while the situation regarding genetic linkage would be unchanged for the future father.

In this case, it does seem likely that donor sperm would be an easier and safer way of achieving the same end. It is possible envisage situations where the outlined scenario might be preferred.

Perhaps donor sperm might not be available, or the male partner might feel that he did not want the child to have another genetic father.

Dr Alun Roberts
Committee Specialist
Science and Technology Committee

It would not be a clone of the mother, but it would be a clone of half of her genes in duplicate. Consequently, any deleterious recessive allele carried by the mother which segregated into the ovum would have no alternative dominant allele from a father to prevent the manifestation of inherited pathologies. In the case of recessive lethal alleles, the offspring would die prematurely.

It should also be remembered that uniparental disomies* affecting various chromosomes are also known to result in genetic disorders. For example, maternal uniparental disomy of chromosome 15 results in Prader-Willi Syndrome (with varying degrees of mental retardation and obesity), whilst maternal uniparental disomy of chromosome 7 is associated with Russell-Silver syndrome and uniparental disomy of chromosome 5 is associated with juvenile spinal muscular atrophy. If any children could be produced in this way, they would almost certainly present the symptoms of all these disorders and probably many more.

The whole idea of deliberately creating individuals with such complications is just crazy!

*The inheritance of both homologous chromosomes from one parent

I would need to be reassured that there would be no increased chance of genetic problems for the resulting child. I see no ethical issue with this senario, but preferable options would include ISCI and the use of donor sperm.

No
I believe that humans are entitled to be brought into the world in a way that is consistent with nature. Children ought not to be seen as the means to the end of dealing with infertlity. To use any means by which to create a child is to disrespect the resulting child in a fundamental way. What would be the impact on the child of knowing that it was not conceived by human parents in the normal sense but was merely generated in an entirely artificial and unhuman way.

This may not be termed human cloning but it certainly appears to be a form of it - an unfertilised egg is manipulated in the laboratory to duplicate its genetic material and become an embryo without being fertilised by sperm. At the very least, full human cloning of embryos is the obvious next step, if these techniques are perfected. Clearly there would be major issues for the child born as a result of this kind of pandering to parental whims and desires.

Safety issues are also very relevant here - the lack of viability and inherent genetic flaws in the embryos produced so far should prevent us from ever permitting this kind of experimentation to be carried out on humans.

Yet again, this kind of scenario begs the question as to what is the fate of any embryos used in the experimentation, and how many embryos would be needed for experimentation, and then destruction, before this technique could be ‘perfected.’

It seems highly irresponsible to develop and make lawful a potentially dangerous technology, with a host of practical, ethical and social concerns, for a small number of people who want to engineer their own particular desired make-up of a child.

This is another way of getting around cloning: the use of unfertilised egg, manipulating that to duplicate genetic materials and an embryo brought about without the need for sperm fertilisation. This embryo has the right set of chromosomes and is human.

To allow a few adults to have children by such means to meet their own ends and at such high costs is highly irresponsible to society as a whole: this includes the destruction of many embryos before the wanted results are achieved, the implications for the child born, and the legacy of inherent genetic flaws for later generations born of that child.

This should not be permitted even for research purposes.