Jon: Welcome to Episode 176 of The Digital Life, the show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings, listeners.

Jon: For the podcast this week, we'll discuss the recent announcement that the world's first baby was born from a new procedure using the DNA of 3 people, so this is a baby with not 1, not 2, but 3 parents.

Dirk: Puts a new spin on ménage a trois, hey, Jon?

Jon: Yes, for sure. I'm not sure that that’s what the French were thinking of when they coined that. Dr. Jon Zhang from the New Hope Fertility Clinic in New York led the team that attempted and succeeded with this mitochondrial transfer procedure. It basically replaced faulty DNA in the mother's egg with healthy DNA from a second woman, and so the baby goes on to inherit genes from 2 mothers and one father. This procedure prevents certain diseases which can be debilitating and even fatal, specifically mitochondrial-related genetic diseases from being passed on to the children.

There are a few children each year who are born with these faults in their mitochondrial DNA, which can cause all sorts of problems. This type of procedure is legalized in the United Kingdom, but there is no other laws on the books that expressly enable this type of procedure to happen in other countries. The team that completed the procedure was U.S.-based, but they did all the work in Mexico, which didn’t have any particular rules in place, and, therefore, I think that raised a few eyebrows in the scientific community.

First, let's just get general impressions and then we'll dig into some of the pretty large ethical and scientific issues that this raises. It doesn’t completely compose all of these potential problems into one thing, but it certainly raises the issue. Let's start with general impressions, Dirk.

Dirk: Yeah. To me, it's superficially more significant than it is in reality. What I mean by that is I think for a long time we've taken an egg from a different woman and planted a sperm from a father and put it in the wife of the father as the host mother for an egg that she didn’t produce, or were taking sperm from another man, putting it into an egg of the mother from someone other than her husband. Of course, marriage is not a prequisite for any of these things. Now, it's taking essentially the egg and taking part of it out from a genetic perspective and replacing it with something else.

It seems newer, scarier maybe, but it's really not that different. It's really making a decision based on the viability of the biological material of one of the parents and making an alteration for the viability or the health of a baby. In and of itself it's doing it at the genetic level as opposed to the sort of substitution of an egg or a sperm cell, which makes it different, but it's pretty similar from an outcome perspective. Where this becomes more compelling is the slippery slope problem, because it's easy to sit back and say, "Oh, yeah, you know, we don’t want to have this child born with this congenital problem. We want it to be born healthy."

Most people are going to nod their heads with that and say, "Yeah, that makes sense," making that replacement okay, but the path isn't that long to the superman, the supermensch model, where you're not replacing to avoid some disease or some condition. You're replacing to enhance. You're replacing to go and not just get healthy, but to healthy superstar. Right? I think that’s where it becomes more interesting. Certainly, this technology is on a path to allow that to happen, even though in the sort of concrete sense that we imagine it probably not able to happen today.

Jon: Yeah. I tend to agree with the things you were just saying. The designer baby is sort of the term given to the scenario of the uber mensch or people who are, at least if they're not superhuman, then they’ve been given selected traits.