Bad news, the first women in the UK will undergo a three-person In Vitro Fertilization technique, British regulators have approved the first uses of a technique called mitochondrial replacement therapy.
Now, in the UK doctors are set, legally, to create a modified human being. Doctors will first fertilize a woman’s egg with sperm and remove its nucleus, leaving the defective mitochondrial DNA behind.
Then they will inject the nucleus into a hollowed-out donor egg containing only healthy mitochondrial DNA, effectively utilizing three people.
In the United States, Congress has banned the research and practice of implanting modified embryos in a person. However, in the UK, China and other places around the world, ethical boundaries are more lenient and as a result, regulations set in this particular field are far more flexible.
This is not the first utilization of a three-person In Vitro Fertilization technique, instead, in Mexico, in 2016, New York fertility doctor John Zhang conducted a similar procedure.