Britain Considers Allowing 3-Parent Babies For In Vitro Fertilization

In a bid to allow parents some control over whether a baby inherits an incurable disease or not, Britain is assessing the feasibility of fetuses born from the DNA of 3 parents, after British scientists declared the ability to do so using cloning technology.

The process includes removing defective genes and replacing them with healthy ones.

It involves intervening in the fertilisation process to remove malfunctioning mitochondrial DNA, which can lead to a range of conditions including fatal heart problems, liver failure, brain disorders, blindness and muscular weakness...

Within a day of uniting egg and sperm using IVF, nuclear DNA is removed from the embryo and implanted into a donor egg, whose own nucleus has been removed and discarded.

The resulting embryo inherits nuclear DNA, or genes, from both its parents, but mitochondrial DNA from a second "mother" who donated the healthy egg.