The future of science has arrived, and as is often the case, it is morally fraught and ethically dubious.
Britain's fertility regulator on Wednesday confirmed the births of the U.K.'s first babies created using an experimental technique combining DNA from three people, an effort to prevent the children from inheriting rare genetic diseases.
The procedure goes like this: For mothers whose mitochondria are faulty in some way, scientists take "genetic material from her egg or embryo" and transfer it into a donor mother's egg or embryo, one that "still has healthy mitochondria but had the rest of its key DNA removed."
The baby is then implanted in the womb of the mother wishing to give birth. Ultimately, the genetic material from the donor mother makes up "less than 1% of the child created from this technique."
Shielding a baby from a lifetime of illness and other difficulties is of course a good thing. Not sure if it's good to do it via this rather chilling "scientific" route.
And then there are the ethics concerns:
Others warn that tweaking the genetic code this way could be a slippery slope that eventually leads to designer babies for parents who not only want to avoid inherited diseases but to have taller, stronger, smarter or better-looking children.
