Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – @ParkstBrett
According to a report from Time, a baby was born last month in Toronto, Canada as the result of a controversial technique that some say could lead to the creation of “three-person babies.”
Natasha and Omar Rajani had been trying to get pregnant for four years when they turned to a controversial in vitro fertilization (IVF) technique that involves the use of DNA from three different cells.
In a so-called three-person scenario, the nucleus of a would-be mother’s egg cell is extracted and transplanted it into the cell of a donor egg. The combination egg, containing genetic material from two women, is then fertilized with sperm from the would-be father.
The reason for transplanting the egg cell nucleus, proponents argue, is to avoid the passing on of deadly mitochondrial diseases from a mother. By transplanting the core genetic material, doctors can discard the faulty mitochondria in a woman’s egg cell.
In this case, the Rajanis were able to use the technique to give birth to their son Zain. However, Zain was actually born from just two parents, not three.
Hold on, we’ll explain
Natasha Rajani’s problem wasn’t that she was in danger of passing on a mitochondrial disease to her child, her eggs just weren’t the most conducive to conception, a common problem for women in their mid-thirties and older, like Rajani.
Instead of using a donor egg cell, Toronto doctors took stem cells from Natasha Rajani’s ovarian tissue for the transplantation technique.
The Rajanis had used traditional IVF techniques before and were only able to acquire one viable embryo. Using the mitochondrial technique, doctors were able to produce four viable embryos: One embryo resulted in Zain’s birth and two others were frozen in case the couple wants to try for another child.
Zain is the first of eight children expected to be born in the coming months via the controversial technique, which is considered illegal in the United States. In February, legislators in the United Kingdom gave the green light to this form of in vitro fertilization.
“This is good news for progressive medicine,” Alison Murdoch – head of Newcastle Fertility Centre at Life, which developed the technique – told The Guardian. “In a challenging moral field, it has taken scientific advances into the clinic to meet a great clinical need and Britain has showed the world how it should be done.”
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