The announcement that children may be prevented from getting incurable diseases after the first baby born with DNA from three people has been greeted with caution by the Christian Medical Fellowship (CMF).
The ground-breaking IVF procedure, known as Mitochondrial Donation Treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children.
Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor’s egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material – about 37 genes – from the donor. The process has been called ‘three-parent babies’, although more than 99.8% of the DNA in these children comes from the mother and father.
