Over the course of the last fortnight there has been widespread media attention on the birth of the world’s first ‘three parent child.’

Although this claim is misleading for several distinct reasons, it has served to focus attention on issues of foundational significance with respect to the limits of biomedicine.

The child in question was conceived with the Nuclear DNA (those which pass on our inherited traits and characteristics) of her biological mother and father and the mitochondrial DNA (often described as the cell’s energy source) of a third party female donor.

There are obvious risks here not the least of which is related to the considerable degree of confusion which is being introduced into the concept of biological parenthood.

Who are the parents of the child produced in this way? It is already the case that the right of the child to know the identity of its mitochondrial donor ‘parent’ has been denied by the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority because none of the child’s inherited traits and characteristics come from the ‘mitochondrial parent’.

Leaving aside for a moment the ethical concerns; the actual procedure itself is a refinement of a technique that was pioneered in the United States by the by clinical embryologist Dr Jacques Cohen called Cytoplasmic Transfer.

Between 1996 and 2002 between 30 to 50 children were conceived in this way before the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) called a halt to the practice of the procedure.

Indeed, Dr Cohen himself noted in 2001 that an 18-month-old child who had been conceived using the technique had been diagnosed with a “pervasive developmental disorder”

But what of the ethical concerns around the apparently refined technique involving mitochondrial DNA?

It its original criticism on the Cytoplasmic Transfer technique the FDA noted that it was an experimental technique that had not been evaluated extensively in animals and that there had been little oversight of this clinical intervention beyond that of local Institutional Review Boards.

There was also, according to the FDA, “a paucity of published preclinical data supporting either the safety or the effectiveness of this procedure.”

Many of those concerns are directly pertinent to the mitochondrial technique under discussion here. These are concerns that have been acknowledged even by parents who have resorted to this form of Assisted Human Reproduction (AHR).

The UK based Center for Genetics and Society have described the mitochondrial technique as “unsafe, with unknown and unforeseeable health consequences for the child as well as for future generations.”

Since the UK became the first country in the world to legalise this technique in 2015 there has been strong reaction on both sides of the debate.

That debate is likely to intensify now that the technique has become a reality.

British MP Fiona Bruce who chaired the All Party Parliamentary Pro-Life Group described the regulations as “the crossing of a rubicon for the first time which would authorise germ line therapy… to alter the genes of an individual. This is something defined by the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as effectively constituting eugenics.”

Germ line therapy involves manipulation of the basic genetic structure of the human embryo or the human genome and the change gets passed on down the generations.

The major ethical concern with this type of procedure revolves around the fact that it creates the possibility of unknown adverse effects being passed on to future generations. 

What does this mean in the context of the Irish ‘debate’ on Assisted Human Reproduction or fertility based medicine?

We know that legislation is being planned to regulate associated areas like IVF, posthumous gamete donation and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. So far the issue of mitochondrial transfer has not been broached.

With this in mind perhaps we ought to learn from the FDA report mentioned above.

There, it was felt that further public discussion was necessary to: 1) evaluate the potential risks of the procedure and 2) recommend how safety should be monitored.

That is the least we can expect. Whether we will get it or not is entirely open to doubt.