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  • Mitochondrial replacement REVISED FINAL SUBMISSION FOR BIOETHICS (May 2015)

    Accepted author manuscript, 462 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

  • Wrigley_et_al-2015-Bioethics

    Rights statement: © 2015 The Authors. Bioethics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

    Final published version, 106 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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Mitochondrial replacement: ethics and identity

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>11/2015
<mark>Journal</mark>Bioethics
Issue number9
Volume29
Number of pages8
Pages (from-to)631-638
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date19/10/15
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs) have the potential to allow prospective parents who are at risk of passing on debilitating or even life-threatening mitochondrial disorders to have healthy children to whom they are genetically related. Ethical concerns have however been raised about these techniques. This article focuses on one aspect of the ethical debate, the question of whether there is any moral difference between the two types of MRT proposed: Pronuclear Transfer (PNT) and Maternal Spindle Transfer (MST). It examines how questions of identity impact on the ethical evaluation of each technique and argues that there is an important difference between the two. PNT, it is argued, is a form of therapy based on embryo modification while MST is, instead, an instance of selective reproduction. The article's main ethical conclusion is that, in some circumstances, there is a stronger obligation to use PNT than MST.

Bibliographic note

© 2015 The Authors. Bioethics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.