Scientist Says Two Men Could Conceive

Sept. 25 -- A baby, born from two dads? It’s possible, says a leading British scientist.

Calum MacKellar, a lecturer in bioethics and biochemistry at Edinburgh University in Scotland said today that, borrowing from techniques used to clone Dolly the sheep, male couples could someday conceive their own children.

Creating a ‘Male Egg’

The technique, which scientists agree still lies far in the future, would use the egg of a woman. Genetic material inside the woman’s egg would be removed and replaced by the DNA of one of the men. That “male egg” would then be fertilized by the sperm of the other man and a surrogate mother would carry the child to term.

MacKellar admits the concept will take at least “a few years” before it’s possible, but he added that scientists had tried the technique with mice and were working on developing it. Others in the field, however, argue the technique is many more than a few years away.

Maxwell Mehlman, a professor of Biomedical Ethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, points out the creators of Dolly the cloned sheep made 227 attempts to fuse the new nucleus into the enucleated egg cell and only 29 produced a viable embryo. Then, of the 29 manufactured embryos implanted into sheep wombs, only one developed into a healthy sheep. Furthermore, the health of Dolly has also been called into question in recent years as the sheep ages.

“A strong argument could be made that the risk of failure, and worse, of producing fetal or short-lived neonatal ‘monsters,’ is too great to justify human experiments in the near future,” says Mehlman.

Avoiding Clashing Sperm

Richard Paulson, chief of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the University of Southern California, already foresees one potential problem. He points out that if chromosomes from a man’s sperm were used to form the male egg, it might clash with the fertilizing sperm of the second man. That’s because both sperm cells would contain so-called centrosomes — an organelle, present only in male sperm that directs embryonic division.