A team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) have been given the go-ahead to create a human embryo using genetic material from two women, raising the future prospect of babies with a pair of mothers.
The team will transfer the components of a human embryo nucleus, made by one man and woman into an unfertilised egg from another woman. It is hoped that the experiment will help prevent mothers from passing on certain genetic diseases to their unborn babies. Such genetic conditions are known as mitochondrial diseases.
The human trial will not allow eggs to develop into babies, but the research nonetheless remains controversial.
Professor John Burn stresses the new tests would not lead to “designer babies”. “From a philosophical or medical point of view there is no reason why we should not do this,” he says. “I would use the analogy of simply replacing the battery in a pocket radio to explain what we are doing. You are not altering the radio at all, just giving it a new power source.”
A baby born following such a technique, he added, would resemble its biological parents rather than the women into whose embryo the nucleus would be transplanted, as characteristics such as hair colour, height and personality come from nucleus DNA.
But campaigners were concerned about the project. “This shows once again that the HFEA does not have any regard for public consultation and the views of the public,” Josephine Quintavalle, from the Comment on Reproductive Ethics group.