We all learned in health class that it takes two people to have a baby, but that may no longer be the case.  The United Kingdom recently approved a technique to create a baby from three people, two women and one man.  The reason for this is to try and prevent deadly genetic diseases related to a person’s mitochondria.  If you have taken a biology course, you know that the mitochondria converts food into useable energy.  Defective mitochondria can cause a person to have insufficient energy to make their heart beat, sustain their brain’s functions, or to move their muscles.

Any baby born through this process will still get all of its genetic information from its parents.  The baby would receive its mitochondria from the third person.  The way the process works is the nucleus is removed from the mother’s egg and the donor’s egg.  The nucleus from the mother’s egg is placed inside the donor egg and the egg is then fertilized.  Ad this condition affects about one in about every 200 babies, three person babies will not be extremely common.  Clinics will be required to apply to Britin’s fertility regulator, The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), to use the technique on a case by case basis.

This process is raising many ethical questions because although all the baby’s DNA would come from its parents, mitochondria have their own DNA.  This means that 0.1% of the DNA in the baby’s cells would be from the donor cell.  Most people are not worried about this, but some scientists think that this could lead to genetically modified “designer babies,” babies who have all their genetic traits chosen by their parents before their birth.  HFEA conducted many safety checks on this process and concluded that this is an ethical procedure.

Extensive research has been done ever since this process came about and the only way to go further in this field is to put it into practice.  While the UK is the first country in the world to legalize this process, a three person baby has already been born.  The baby lives in Mexico and is understood to be healthy.