Mitochondria and animal cells may be joined at the hip, but they still have separate DNA.
This is important - the donor egg is just a shell. We're a long way from bioroids, people.
Wrong. Assumptions like this are where everything fucks up, and are unscientific to begin with.
Cellular contents, even non-genetic ones, are highly involved in gene interaction and the progression of cell lines, even outside of mitochondria. It was a while back where they went "oh gee, cytoplasm actually has all sorts of stuff in it and isn't just inert goo", and that's what we know about it *currently*.
"People are already lousy parents, that's a bigger deal" isn't really a good argument for allowing this without proper oversight, either. What bothers me is that there already isn't any damn oversight for genetic modification of...well, anything. Once again it's an all or nothing deal where you either have complete laizzes-faire freedom of huge corporations to do whatever in the name of profit, or hysterical government bills that ban everything related to it in the name of stopping clone armies and human-animal hybrids.
So the latter looks ridiculous, people go with the former, something less crazy but still undesirable happens (like starlink corn spreading into the wild population), and people either shrug because there's no immediate effect or flip out and shun the tech entirely because it's now scary.
Basically I would like debates to no longer be YES/NO, especially with regards to science that affects our entire society.
Romo.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not "Rah rah let corporations do their thing". My view is that corporations are temporary, but science is eternal (barring amusing doomsday scenarios), so I'm more concerned with the implications of a discovery in and of itself, rather than how any particular Monsanto-esque group might exploit it in the next few decades.
One of two things will happen.
1) The process will cause all kinds of horrifying errors or genetic problems. Sooner or later this will lead to it being discredited for use. OR, the process will be improved or fixed, taking us to point 2.
2) The process works just fine and results in a healthier human population. At this point we must consider the socioeconomic and societal ramifications of the process (or, hopefully, this has already been considered).
I'm not saying that letting companies go nuts with the first option, leaving tens of thousands of damaged people is a good thing, but that's not what I was talking about.
The only time I REALLY get worried is when an advance like this or GM crops threatens the orginal naturally-evolved species with extinction, because I believe that not only is genetic diversity a good thing, but also that it will take generations upon generations to fully gauge the impact of GM foods and humans.
