SUMMARY:Over the past year, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital has been pioneering a virtual reality technology that enables pediatric patients, and their parents, to “tour” their brains before surgery. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports on how this 3-D platform may help young patients with epilepsy and brain tumors reduce their fears and anxieties before surgery, and maybe even yield an "epiphany."
SUMMARY:Clubfoot, a treatable birth defect that can bring pain and social isolation, is often not treated in the developing world. But a treatment developed a half century ago by a doctor in Iowa is less invasive, less expensive and less painful than the corrective surgery that was once required. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on how a charity is trying to bring the cure to children in India.
SUMMARY: When women have defective mitochondria, their children can inherit terrible, sometimes fatal problems. A new technology, pioneered in England, adds healthy cellular structure from a third person, meaning that children are born with DNA from three people. William Brangham learns more from Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University and Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now to questions surrounding a significant advance in reproductive technology with DNA and embryos.
The change on the horizon was pioneered and approved in England and it is now being considered for use in the U.S. Proponents believe it may eliminate dangerous disease in children, but others have raised ethical concerns.
Today, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that clinical trials go forward in the U.S.
William Brangham has our look.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): This new technology is called mitochondrial replacement technique, or MRT for shot.
Mitochondria are tiny structures that exist in nearly all the cells in our bodies, and have their own unique DNA. The problem is, a very small number of women have defective mitochondria, and if they have children, those kids inherit their mom’s mitochondria and can suffer terrible, sometimes fatal, problems, including brain damage and heart failure.
This new technology would, in essence, replace that original mitochondria in either the mother’s egg or in the parents’ embryo with healthy mitochondria from a third person. A child born this way would then be carrying the DNA of three different people.
Earlier today, patient advocate Laurie Strongin told us why the advance was so important for a small group of parents.
LAURIE STRONGIN, Patient Advocate: One of the things that we have found is that parents’ desire to have genetically related offspring is a widely held desire. It’s not universal, but it’s widely held.
And the potential to use MRT to have offspring who are genetically related to both parents is something that families who carry mtDNA disease really want. And not everyone is going to pursue it, but for the family for whom having children who are — who have a nuclear genetic connection to them, this is something that will just be one of numerous options available to them.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
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