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CNN Live Today

FDA Holding Hearing on Controversial Fertility Treatment

Aired May 09, 2002 - 10:45   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: The Food and Drug Administration is holding a hearing today on a controversial fertility treatment that's supposed to help women when normal in vitro techniques have failed for them. The feds banned this procedure a year ago, and they're now deciding whether or not to continue that ban.

Our medical news correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is here now now from Atlanta to explain the treatment and why it is so controversial.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's very controversial, and it's very interesting. Now, Leon, since 1996, about 30 children have been born using this technique. Here you see two of them. These children are four years old, and their mom had gone through eight IVF cycles, in vitro fertilization cycles, and she was pretty much ready to give up, and then she tried this technique. Let's take a look at why it's so controversial. The reason -- if you take a look on the left, that's a donor egg from an younger woman. The recipient egg is from, typically, an older woman who's having trouble conceiving.

What doctors do is they siphon off just a little of the cytoplasm. That's the jell-like substance around the nucleus. They take it out of donor egg, and then they put it into the recipient egg. Now there is some genetic material in cytoplasm. Most genetic material is within the nucleus, and they they don't touch that. But there is some that is within the cytoplasm, and that's why this is so controversial.

However, the doctors who do this procedure, and the patients who have had children with it say that it's safe, and they're furious that the FDA has taken it away.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

uf So I was willing to give it one more shot, and it was just a miracle that through that I got pregnant, and I got pregnant with two bones, a boy and a girl, and they turned out in absolute perfect health, and they're just absolutely wonderful, perfect miracles. I would feel very badly for all the woman who the procedure might help, and I'm relinguishing my privacy on this today because I feel that knowing about this procedure for people who need it is vital, and that it would be helpful to many women out there who have a similar problem that I have.

(END VIDEO CLIP) COHEN: Now, after hearing from this mom, you might be thinking, gosh, why would the FDA want to take this procedure away from people? Well, the answers that the FDA says, what they're doing in this procedure is basically transferring genetic material from one mom to another mom. They say that there haven't been enough animal studies to show that it's safe, and they point out there were two pregancies where it was found that the fetus had a cromosomal abnormality called Turner's Syndrome, and in one case, the women miscarried, and in another case, the woman elelected to have an abortion.

The folks who pioneered this process say that it's unclear that the process is what caused the Turner Syndrome, but the FDA is anxious enough about it to say, you know what, we want you to stop doing this until we can think about it some more.

HARRIS: You would think, though, that the FDA would rather have a family that actually has most of the -- the same DNA, and that's exactly what this procedure has produced, right?

COHEN: Yes, exactly.

HARRIS: Has there ever been a case where anybody else has been able to prove that having a mixture of three different sets of DNA is a real problem at all? Has there been any kind of study anywhere?

COHEN: Well, they don't know. That's the problem, because this is so new. The fertility doctors came up with it, and they tried and all of these women, and it worked. Most of the DNA is from the original mother, the DNA that's in the nucleus, that gives you your hair color, your eye color, your height, and all that from the original mother. However, in the cytoplasm, there's what's called mitochondrial DNA. So you are getting some genetic material from another woman, and what the FDA says is they're kind of experimenting on these people, and that that could be wrong.

HARRIS: It is something of an experiment, if they're actually doing it, and it hasn't been tested.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: The interesting thing, though, is this bigger issue that we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, and that is, how long as women do we have to have babies? And women want options, and they're going to push for things like that.

COHEN: Especially women like the mom whom we heard from, who tried IDF eight times, and what she said, is she said, look, my husband and I knew the risk, we knew there were two fetuses that had Turner Syndrome, we were completely educated on this, and we decided to try it, and it's our right, and it should already and should be other people's right to decide to try this. And what the FDA and some bioethicists I talked to said is look, it's one thing to assume risk for yourself. It's another thing to assume risk for an unborn child.

KAGAN: Which brings up a whole other another segment. Come back another day for that one.

COHEN: All right, I will. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com