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Published online 6 February 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.560
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A step towards three-parent babies?
Progress report shows clinical application of technique still far away.
A predictable media circus followed a UK newspaper's report yesterday that scientists have created so-called 'three-parent embryos'. But some of the reports have misconstrued what the scientists have actually done thus far, and the scientists caution that their unpublished work, while promising, is still far from clinical use.
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I am very impressed with this research which is a very important step in preventing disorders associated with mitochondria, which are usually very hard to treat. However my main concern is not the research, it is the media circus which usually follows such research. The news media is usually where the general public gains information about scientific research in general, unfortunately, the media is notorious for its numerous inaccuracies, false controversies, biased opinions, & downright lies. I do understand that the target audience is usually people with little or no knowledge of the details of such research, thus, journalist must write articles that even the lay person can understand. They must also make efforts to attract that target audience by making such articles “interesting†where they don’t confuse, or bore the people who are reading them. Unfortunately, in the mad dash to “get the latest scoopâ€, the facts usually take a back seat and that is where misunderstandings and misinformation about such research occurs. Such misinformation can be quite counterproductive, at times even destructive, even more so than no information at all. So, it is very important for scientists to be very careful about what they say when communicating to the news media and the general public, and to be very clear when they say it.
It is true that the media is notorious for its numerous inaccuracies, false controversies, biased opinions, & downright lies as pointed out by Brandon Ore.
Just to clarify, the mitochondrial genome is about 200,000 times smaller than the human genome - the item gives the impression that the ratio is 100:1 - this lower ratio may reflect the total quantity of each kind of DNA in a cell, but is misleading since there are many identical copies of the mitochondrial genome. So if there were to be three parents, they would provide very different informational inputs into the resulting embryo.