Here's a cool story: A baby was born with the DNA from three parents, thanks to groundbreaking — but controversial — procedure.
According to New Scientist, the baby boy, who was born on April 6 to his two Jordanian parents, is the product of a mitochondrial transfer, a procedure that only became legal in the UK last year. The procedure permits a mother to swap out her mitochondrial DNA for a donors' to prevent her baby from inheriting any harmful diseases she may carry. In this case, that was necessary, as the baby's mother carried the fatal Leigh's disease. In fact, the mother had given birth to a baby in 2005 who had been born with the disease, and the baby died at only eight months old. (So you can only imagine that she'd be looking for some sort of solution to create a healthy baby.)
Dr. John Zhang of the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City performed the transfer in Mexico, which doesn't have rules or regulations regarding the procedure.
"To save lives is the ethical thing to do," he said to New Scientist.
A video New Scientist posted breaks down how it all happened.
And while it's easy to imagine many mothers who carry fatal diseases rallying behind Zhang's actions, the procedure is not without critics, many of which claim it creates "designer babies." Using three people's DNA to create one baby has also gone awry in the past — New Scientist notes that people tried to make babies with three parents' DNA in the '90s, but some of the babies inherited disorders, and that methodology hadn't been used since. That's in part why this nearly six-month-old baby is such a remarkable story: no disorders have been reported yet. So far, the baby is totally healthy.
Also worth nothing is that the colloquially used term "three-parent baby" might not even be the correct phrasing, as the donor's genes account for about .1 percent of the baby's genetic makeup, according to a study published in the journal Trends In Endocrinology and Metabolism. That, the study says, negates the argument that babies born this way have connections to three parents.
After all, the central component of the procedure is that it allows two parents to create healthy children when they might not otherwise have been able to do so.
(h/t The New Scientist)