This episode of Voices on bioethics focuses on mitochondrial donation.
Andy Greenfield is an honorary research fellow at Oxford University and an expert on mitochondrial donation and the ethics of assisted reproduction. He is also a member of the Regulatory Horizons Council, an expert committee that advises the UK Government on the regulation of emerging technologies in diverse sectors.
In this episode he’ll guide us through the most common objections to mitochondrial donation to give us an insight into the ethical questions that surround the method.
The Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics will make a statement regarding if Sweden should allow mitochondrial donation or not. Read more about the ongoing work here. (In Swedish)
Facts
Mitochondrial donation is an IVF based technique to replace the faulty mitochondrial DNA in the patient’s eggs with healthy mitochondrial DNA from a donor egg.
This results in a reconstructed egg, which contains the nuclear DNA from the patient and her partner and mitochondrial DNA from the unaffected donor.