MITOCHONDRIAL REPLACEMENT: ETHICS AND IDENTITY 1. INTRODUCTION Mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs) have the potential to allow prospective parents who are at risk of passing on mitochondrial disorders to have healthy children to whom they are genetically related. Mitochondrial disorders

Mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs) have the potential to allow prospective parents who are at risk of passing on mitochondrial disorders to have healthy children to whom they are genetically related. Mitochondrial disorders are often debilitating or even lifeshortening and the development of techniques to prevent them is a welcome prospect. Ethical concerns have however been raised about these techniques. 1 This paper focuses on just one aspect of the ethical debate, the question of whether there is any moral difference between the two types of MRT proposed: Pronuclear Transfer (PNT) and Maternal Spindle Transfer (MST). It examines how questions of identity impact on the ethical evaluation of each technique and argues that there is an important difference between the two. PNT, it is argued, is a form of therapy based on embryo modification while MST is, instead, an instance of selective reproduction. The paper’s main ethical conclusion is that, in some circumstances, there may be a stronger obligation to utilise PNT than to use MST.