Implications of Law’s Response to Mitochondrial Donation

Abstract

Changes to Australian law in 2022 made Australia the second country to expressly permit the clinical use of mitochondrial donation (MD), a technology that makes heritable changes to the human genome. This paper considers these changes in the context of Australia’s broader controls on human embryo use to provide insights into future regulatory responses to other emerging genetic technologies, which could be used in reproduction.

Keywords

• legal regulation
• mitochondrial donation
• genome editing
• genetic technology
• embryo research