Just to clarify: the technique involves DNA from two parents and mitochondria from a donor - the donor’s DNA is specifically excluded.
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The donor’s nuclear DNA is excluded. The donor’s mitochondrial DNA is what is used.
A little but fairly meaningful difference.
Could have interesting forensics side-effects, too.
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Sorry - my mistake.
Plot twist: unbeknownst to you, you’re actually adopted, and that weird stranger is actually your biological parent. Could you now love them like family?
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I am the Science Communication Director at the Science Centre that shares a site with the Newcastle University Lab that developed the technique and have been keeping up to speed on it as it developed so I thought it might be useful to clarify a few points. Firstly, yes, it has been extensively tested to ensure it works and is safe before going anywhere near human use. Secondly ‘three parent’ is somewhat misleading, in any real sense of the word ‘parent’ offspring made possible by this technique will just have the usual two parents. Nothing that affects their appearance, character etc will have any influence from the person whose mitochondria are used. The genomes of the nucleus of the cell, which contain the parental DNA and those of the the mitochondria are absolutely separate and do not exchange DNA. The parental DNA contains 10,000 genes or thereabouts, the mitochondrial DNA contains 27 genes and these are solely concerned with the working of the mitochondria. This is why it is such a neat technique, it allows families blighted by disease caused by defective mitochondria to escape from that without altering anything else about themselves
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Most people with no personal experience in the matter expect that being informed you’re adopted is a shock, but in my case it was a welcome relief. It explained so many things that I had already sensed, far beyond “my brother and sister have blue eyes and freckles, why don’t I?”
When in my twenties I first met and got to know my “birth” relatives (both parents, full siblings) it wasn’t at all like meeting strangers. We were shockingly alike even knowing we were related, not only in terms of traits possessed and traits lacked but also lots of little details you wouldn’t normally consider heritable, like nail-biting and not liking coffee. In the case of my mother, on the first day we met we were also wearing the exact same colors.
Babies are definitely not blank slates.
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I never said they were. But they aren’t clones of their parents, either. (And if we’re going by anecdotes, my parents love Ginger but it tastes like soap to me. And we don’t like the same colours. Maybe I’m adopted? Or maybe confirmation bias is a wonderful thing?)
Lots of people have relatives they can’t stand, and lots of people probably wouldn’t like their immediate family if they hadn’t been raised with/by them. Conversely, lots of people could love strangers if they had been raised with/by them.
I’m sorry that you apparently don’t love your adoptive parents like family, but I find your argument less than compelling.
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Look at what you just did. Someone wrote that they had always felt different, and welcomed finally learning the truth because it made them feel less crazy. They further confirmed that truth for themselves by feeling NOT different when around people who share DNA with them.
And you immediately jumped to the assumption that they were saying they don’t love their adoptive family.
You’ve insulted and belittled this person for no good reason. Why? Why do you assume people can only love one person or one family in their lifetime?
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That’s a fair complaint, but here’s why I said that:
I think a fair reading of that suggests that one probably could not love a stranger like family, and it’s difficult for me to imagine an adopted person writing these words unless he or she really didn’t accept or love his/her adoptive parents as family. This is why I said @MQtiepie apparently doesn’t love his/her adoptive parents like family.
Again, that’s an assumption based on your prejudices. The poster was countering an all-too-prevalent mindset by pointing out that you can’t just pair up strangers and expect that it’s always going to work perfectly. It certainly can: plenty of arranged marriages develop real love over time. But they don’t go into the contract assuming that. Furthermore, the example offered the thought position of being either parent or child in the arrangement, which indicates it wasn’t meant to be only a personal data point.
I work at both ends of this issue: I consult for an international adoption medical clinic (so, newly adoptive families with international issues) and I do genealogy research for adults who are donor-conceived, descendants of adoptees, etc. Side note: I find it interesting that a sizable percentage of people asking for research help are looking for info on their parents or grandparents who were adopted rather than themselves, and usually after they’ve had children and realize there’s a whole side of the family (including genetic issues) they don’t know. So, I see how this passes down through multi-generations. And as I’ve said, I personally know three donor-conceived who only found out when they developed genetic conditions in their 40s and 50s that they were donor-conceived. It’s called “late discovery”, and the resultant issues are very well known in this field.
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I don’t think that’s the natural implication of what he was saying. I think that for most people, it is faintly ridiculous to suggest that they could love a random stranger on a bus as family, and not at all similar to suggesting they could love an adopted child (or their adoptive parents) with whom they have grown up.
I’m sure things don’t always work perfectly in adoptive families; they don’t always work perfectly in biological families, either.
I’m really not in a position to speak for what someone else is thinking, especially not someone I don’t even know, but again I have to point out that you’re assuming the worst about the poster. At one point in time, the adoptee and the adoptive family really were random strangers who found themselves put together by circumstance. I don’t see why you would assume the comparison was literally between a family who have been together for 20 years versus a random stranger.
But why does it matter, anyway? Even if this individual poster is a hateful person who has never shown proper gratitude for anything in life, what does that have to do with feeling like one doesn’t belong, and has been lied to for their entire lives? If anything, it should be understood that those sorts of things would in fact interfere with the ability to learn how to trust and love.
After all, if things “don’t always work perfectly in biological families, either”, why is this person being held to a higher standard of how much they are supposed to declare their love of family to a group of random strangers on the internet?
Think of it this way…I don’t know if you have children or not, but you’ve probably had at least two parents at some point in your life. Imagine that every time you talk about spending time with your dad, strangers make a point of reminding you that you really should be talking about how wonderful your mom is instead. If you mention that your dad taught you how to fish, they’ll point out that you’re not showing enough appreciation in that moment for the fact that your mom taught you how to cook. If you complain that your mom yelled at you at breakfast, they’ll berate you for not loving her. Crazy, right?
You can love more than one parent, and you can love more than one family, and you can be mad at them for something they’ve done but still love them anyway. Just because someone is talking about a specific problem that occurred in their family – one that is known to be a problem in other similar families – doesn’t mean they are stating they don’t love their family. So don’t jump to that conclusion.
But again, I’ll say: even if they don’t love their family, that doesn’t mean the point they’re making isn’t valid.
I don’t think that most adoptions occur “by circumstance”—they tend to be by the choice of the parents.
And I guess I was wrong to take the given example at face value?
I didn’t say he/she was a hateful person who hasn’t shown proper gratitude, nor do I think children should show gratitude simply for having been raised. I just said it appears she/he didn’t love his adoptive parents. Nobody, adopted or not, has to love their parents—but I think most people do.
Again, I don’t think she/he has to. I’m simply saying that most children—adopted or not—have forged stronger bonds with the individuals who raised them than they could with strangers on a bus. I mean, the entire point of my initial comment was that the bonds are likely to be strong by virtue of being raised by those people than they would be with people who didn’t raise you, regardless of how much genetic information you share.
Which is, to major degree, determined by… drumroll please… the circumstances!
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Well, if you adopt that perspective then there are few things in life which aren’t, to a major degree, similarly determined by circumstance.
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I really don’t understand why you keep going back to:
- this poster doesn’t love their family, and
- bonds between people are “more likely to be strong” after spending decades together then when they first meet as strangers (well, duh).
One of the two of us has a lot more regular contact with significant numbers of adoptive and donor-conceived families than the other. What I inferred from this poster’s story was that they loved their family and thus hated themselves because they couldn’t understand why they weren’t fitting in (if they didn’t care, they wouldn’t care). This was is a well-known problem in these families, when the truth of the person’s origins are kept secret. They blame themselves because they don’t want to blame the people they love. The problem is the opposite of not enough love…it doesn’t hurt as much to be deceived by people you don’t love.
Here we are on a thread about a new way in which a baby can grow up in a family without knowing that their genetic heritage isn’t 100% from their parents. This poster bared their soul, and described how devastating it is to find out the people you’ve loved and trusted your entire life have in fact been lying to you, especially when the info would have made you feel so much more comfortable in your skin and calmed all the fears you grew up with. This is why adoptees and donor-conceived generally only tell their truths to each other. Fortunately the internet has made that much more possible. There are thousands of support forums for this sub-group. They need to support each other, because when they come to a general forum and tell the truth, they’re lambasted for not loving their families enough. And of course that means whatever they say can be discounted and/or discarded.
They’re related, and both arise from the poster saying that your ability to love a stranger on a bus as family is analogous to whether a parent could love an adopted child or an adopted child could love the parents that raised them.
Well, duh, it’s a dumb comparison. I pointed out the “well, duh” aspect of it. In fact, it’s such a “well, duh” analogy that the only way I can imagine an adopted person making it is if they had serious problems with their adoptive family and actually consider them to be little different from strangers they met on a bus. In other words, I took the poster’s statements at face value.
Mitochondrial DNA codes only a very, very small amount of information.
I don’t think that’s really a prevalent mindset. I think people generally believe that if you are raised by people then those people are your parents even if you aren’t related (and manage to concurrently believe that blood ties are staggeringly important) - but not that anyone will just get along with anyone.
I think people reject these stories for a lot of reasons. Partly because most people probably know a family with adopted and/or donor-conceived children and can’t separate the idea of having unique challenges from being considered a worse family. Partly because it raises an ugly feeling that we might be essentially racist. Partly because a lot of people have a lot of trouble getting along with and fitting in with their birth parents and they suspect that some adopted children are just in the same boat. Maybe mostly because in families people want love to be enough.
But I think there is a broad cultural issue that is a bigger problem than any technology for conceiving children. Parents lying to their children about how they were conceived is a big mistake. I can understand not going into details with very young children (just as you don’t go into details about how non-adopted non-donor children came to be) but by the time they are interested and asking questions it’s far better to give straight answers. But the real question is, why are people lying about this?
If parents really believe that they love their adopted or donor-conceived children as much as they would [adjective]* children, or as much as they do their [adjective] children that they are raising at the same time, then why not let the children know? They are hiding it from their children, hiding it from themselves, and hiding it from the world because they don’t really believe it, or at least their children, upon finding out they have been lied to their whole lives are forgiven for thinking that’s why they lied.
People think they can keep secrets from their children, but they can’t. Adopted children who are lied to live in a system built to lie them about important things. I can’t think of a better recipe for making children feel like they don’t fit in. Telling the truth from the beginning isn’t something to do to explain why kids might feel like they don’t fit in, it’s something to make them fit in - to fit in the way that they really do.
- Is there an appropriate adjective here? A ‘cis’ to adopted/donor-conceived’s ‘trans’?
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Random thought. What about sub-defective mitochondria, the kind that does not malfunction in a pathological way but still makes the person prone to fatigue? Could this method be used for engineering a more vigorous human?
I’d go for an acronym. ADC for Adopted/Donor-Conceived, NADC for Non-Adopted/Donor-Conceived.
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