World’s First Three-Parent Baby Born in Mexico

The controversial technique is supposed to allow parents with rare genetic diseases have healthy children. In this case, it was the mother who carried the disorder. She carries the genes for Leigh Syndrome, a fatal disorder that attacks the developing nervous system, and also resulted in the deaths of her first two children.

Around a quarter of her mitochondria have the disease-causing mutation. While she is healthy, Leigh syndrome was responsible for the deaths of her first two children. The couple sought out the help of John Zhang and his team at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City.

Zhang has been working on a way to avoid mitochondrial disease using a so-called “three-parent” technique. In theory, there are a few ways of doing this. The method approved in the UK is called pronuclear transfer and involves fertilising both the mother’s egg and a donor egg with the father’s sperm. Before the fertilised eggs start dividing into early-stage embryos, each nucleus is removed. The nucleus from the donor’s fertilised egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother’s fertilised egg.

But this technique wasn’t appropriate for the couple – as Muslims, they were opposed to the destruction of two embryos. So Zhang took a different approach, called spindle nuclear transfer. He removed the nucleus from one of the mother’s eggs and inserted it into a donor egg that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting egg – with nuclear DNA from the mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor – was then fertilised with the father’s sperm.

While this “controversial” procedure was done with good intentions, it’s a problem of ethics that these doctors are now facing. Having created five embryos an using the only one that developed normally, many believe this to be unethical. The doctors who performed the procedure, however, feel that they made the right choice, claiming that to save lives is the ethical thing to do. Did they save a life, though? Where is the line between saving life and creating life? Apparently mankind has learned nothing from Michael Chriton novels.

Source: newscientist.com