Maybe one mom is enough.
At least in the public's view and much of the medical community's it seems to be. A fertility technique that caused an uproar earlier this month because it inserted DNA from a woman other than the mother into a baby's inherited genes has come under scrutiny again.
It turns out two out of 18 fetuses conceived using the technique developed a genetic disorder called Turner's syndrome. One miscarried and the other was aborted when the disorder was discovered.
Michael Soules, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine cried foul because the information seemed to have been kept on the low-low.
But researchers at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of Saint Barnabas in West Orange, New Jersey, where the technique was performed, say the genetic defects had nothing to do with the fertility procedure.
Turner's syndrome is associated with infertility that occurs in 1 out of 3,000 pregnancies. It's a disorder in women that inhibits sexual development and causes infertility due to a missing X chromosome.
But Soules nevertheless is skeptical of the procedure because it crosses an ethical line that scientists have historically promised never to cross.
Although the intention was simply to treat women for infertility, they've created the first human offspring with changes to their "germline," or the genes they'll pass on to future generations. In this case, the babies' genes contain DNA from two women instead of just one.
They used a technique called ooplasmic transfer to take healthy mitochondria from donors and inject it into the infertile women's eggs in a petri dish to replace their defective mitochondria.
Superior mitochondrial DNA won't make anyone smarter or give them a nicer figure -- because mitochondria is a type of DNA that functions only to fuel cells, but doesn't control brain activity or hair thickness. But it's still a precedent for altering the germline, which makes bioethicists, as well as lots of regular folks, squirm.
Whether or not the Turner's syndrome cases were caused by the technique, the Saint Barnabas docs might do well by adopting a full disclosure policy, lest this technique go the way of gene therapy.
Disease gene spree: The publication of the human genome in February opened the floodgates for the discovery of genes associated with disease. Researchers have found genes that play a role in diabetes, Alzheimer's, myriad cancers and the list goes on and on.
Just this week, genes discovered to be associated with Crohn's disease (an inflammatory bowel disorder), aortic aneurysms, autism and multiple sclerosis were written up in the scientific journals Nature Circulation, The American Journal of Medical Genetics and Neurology, respectively.
Researchers know these milestones won't lead to treatments for these diseases anytime soon.
Identifying the genes gives researchers a place to possibly start looking for drug targets, but at this point they have no idea what, if any, chemicals might correct what's going wrong with these genes.
What the discoveries do provide in the near-term are potential diagnostic tools.
Once a gene is associated with a disease, they've got a way to test people for it. But testing brings up lots of questions in addition to answers. If you test positive for the gene, does that mean you are destined to get the disease? Or could you be in for a lifetime of unnecessary worry? Is there any treatment for the disease? If not, do you really want to know if you'll get it?
In the case of Crohn's disease, the researchers say in their paper that not everyone with the gene will get it.
If your partner has the recently discovered trait for aortic aneurysms, even if you don't have it, there's a 50 percent chance your children will. Do you want to have prospective life partners tested?
On the other hand there are conditions, like heart disease, that you might be able to avert with diet and exercise even if you're predisposed.
Getting tested for genetic pre-dispositions is clearly a personal choice. It might be worth seeking the advice of a genetic counselor (or two) in advance.
Genome rivals to meet: The two groups spearheading the gene mania have had a stormy relationship.
Their blustery history should make for a lively meeting in June, when they plan to hold a workshop to compare the assembly of their respective human genome maps.
Researchers from the nonprofit Human Genome Project and for-profit company Celera Genomics will put their heads together, most likely butting them, on June 6 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
An April meeting was postponed for reasons that remain vague.
The official word is that recent challenges regarding the accuracy of both maps from various researchers won't be discussed. It will be interesting to see if J. Craig Venter, president of Celera, and Eric Lander, director of the genome sequencing center at the Whitehead Institute, will manage to hold their tongues.
