Is It Possible for a Child to Have Three Parents?

Medical advancements have recently created offspring with more than two parents. The ethical nature of these procedures are still debated. Perhaps if there are natural examples of triparental offspring, the ethical issues would be easier to resolve.

For a number of reasons, procedures that result in an offspring with more than two biological parents have been developed. On a relatively basic level, artificial insemination and surrogacy result in an offspring with two genetic parents, but with a third parent as the mother carrying the child.

In more extreme cases, it is possible for a child to be created with three genetic parents. This process has been used to prevent genetic disorders involving the mitochondria of the mother. While most people think of genes being limited to the DNA in our own nuclei, mitochondria, in humans, have their own separate DNA. The mitochondria of the mother, and thus any genetic issues with those mitochondria, are passed from mother to offspring, via the egg.

There are a few ways to deal with this issue. One procedure has that has recently been used to prevent a mitochondrial disorder, is a process that is very similar to cloning. The process starts by collecting a healthy egg from a donor. The nucleus of that egg is removed. Then the nucleus from one of the mother’s eggs is extracted and implanted into the donor egg. Finally, the new hybrid egg is fertilized with the father’s sperm. At this point the nuclear DNA consists of the two biological parents, but the mitochondria, and thus the mitochondrial DNA, comes from the donor.

A number of ethical issues have been proposed for triparental offspring. The major issue is that the methods are still fairly untested. It’s rare that there’s a…

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