Three Person Babies

The time has come to start making babies from three people, scientists advising the UK’s fertility regulator have said.

15:52 13 December 2016

Scientists advising the UK’s fertility regulator have said that the time has come to start making babies from three people. A three-person IVF is a technique that replaces the defective power packs in the mother’s egg – called mitochondria – with healthy ones from a donor woman to prevent certain diseases. 

 

A three-person baby has most of its genetic inheritance from its parents but also a tiny amount from the donor woman. 

 

The technique, which has been successfully performed in Mexico, can still lead to some defective mitochondria ending up in the resulting embryo. A study published in Nature suggests that those defective mitochondria could still take over in one in eight babies and cause a disease. 

 

However, Prof Robin Lovell-Badge, one of the researchers who reviewed the evidence, said that its time to carry out the procedure in the UK: "We're not going to learn much more now unless you try it out for real basically - it's at that stage.” 

 

"There's no reason why it shouldn't go ahead now, but do it cautiously on selected patients where the risk of having a badly affected child is very high."