Good day and welcome to the Monday, July the 28th, 2025 edition of Denison Forum's Daily

Article podcast. I'm Chris Elkins, narrator, voicing today's daily article,

authored by our friend and CEO, Dr. Jim Denison.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, mitochondrial diseases are a group of genetic conditions

that affect how mitochondria in your cells produce energy.

They can cause developmental delays in children, profound muscle weakness, hearing loss,

blindness, strokes, and heart failure.

Those with the worst symptoms die earliest,

often before the age of three. Now, there's a way to prevent the transmission of these diseases

to the next generation. Researchers in the UK reported recently on the birth of eight babies,

each of whom was conceived using one sperm and two eggs. They took the combination of the

mother and father's DNA from a fertilized egg with sick mitochondria and inserted it into a surrogate

egg with healthy mitochondria stripped of its own DNA. Think of extracting the yolk from a chicken

egg and inserting it into an egg whose

yolk has been removed. The children produced in this way will avoid the mitochondrial diseases

they would otherwise have inherited. What's not to like about this news? A good deal, as it turns

out, I serve as the resident scholar for ethics with one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the country.

In the health care context, I understand the appeal of this procedure.

If we can remove malignant tumors, why not remove diseased mitochondria to produce healthy babies?

However, I see at least five issues with three

parent embryos. First, the mitochondria from the surrogate eggs transmitted their own DNA to the

children. While only 1% of the total, this DNA can influence brain development and affect everything from lifespan and height

...