Three Parents Can Make A Baby In Britain

Britain is the first country that has voted in favour of three parents creating a child together. That means, one father and two mothers together can make a child!

That certainly does not mean a multiple-partner sexual act, but is just a particular method of in-vitro fertilization inserting some parts of one woman's cells into a second woman's egg. It replaces, via transplantation, the birth mother's mitochondria, or the "energy-making power plants" of every cell that has its own DNA, not linked with the DNA creating the rest of the body, according to wired.com.

This method would help to repair some diseases in the womb. The method means that two sets of eggs---one of them from the mother with some errors in her mitochondrial DNA would be fused with another woman's, whose mitochondria has no mutations, says Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a geneticist who specializes in mitochondria at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Within an hour, high-powered microscopes, microsurgical needles, and lasers help physicians to remove the nucleus from each cell which has the mitochondrial setbacks. "We keep the nuclei from the donor female, and place them in the cytoplasm from the other donor," Mitalipov says.

There are 25,000 or so genes in the nucleus that lead to the creation of humans. However, 37 small "oddball genes in the mitochondria" are in control of some biochemical reactions that are used by the body to create energy. "Those don't make up what we are in terms of appearance or mental abilities," says Mitalipov.

But then, if the DNA, called the 'mtDNA' has a few mutations that shake the mitochondria's ability to make energy, then it may lead to some illnesses, which could include: "Leigh's disease, progressive infantile poliodystrophy, and Barth syndrome, epilepsy, diabetes and even bad eyesight."

Like nucleic DNA, mothers transmit the mitochondrial DNA to children. However, unlike the genes a baby inherits from its mother's egg and father's sperm, mitochondrial DNA does not contribute to looks, temperament, or non-mitochondrial fitness.

How does the mitochondria affect an embryo? Biologists still don't know, completely. However, through non-human research from rats to rhesus monkeys, these fears can be fought. "We know what mitochondria can do, and we know what mutations can do," says Mitalipov. "That was the primary reason why we decided to define this procedure."

Will this pass on some mitochondrial characteristics that have not been understood completely? Yes, that possibility is there, admit scientists. However, it would take more time to understand the process and its results.

The legal fate of three-parent babies will be decided only at the end of February in the House of Lords, after the vote in the House of Commons has been cleared. Fifteen years after it was first proposed, the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act will now be amended. Members of British Parliament (MPs) voted 382-128 in favor of updating the regulation, which could take effect on October 29 if approved by the House of Lords, according to dailybeast.com.

Not everyone is in favour of the procedure. "No other country has allowed this procedure and the international scientific community is not convinced that the procedure is safe and effective," said Roman Catholic bishop the Right Reverend John Sherrington. "There are also serious ethical objections to this procedure which involves the destruction of human embryos as part of the process."

But for mothers like Sharon Bernardi, who lost all seven of her children as a result of mitochondrial disease, these changes are welcome. "No child should be born with a disease that's going to cut their life short. I can't believe anybody from the Church would want that," she told the BBC.