[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPAg50-ciZM&w=728&h=408]
This week, British legislators in the House of Commons voted to enact laws that would make the U.K. the first country to allow the in vitro fertilization technique known as mitochondrial transfer. Because the resulting offspring contains DNA from three separate people (two parents provide the nuclear DNA, which controls most of our personal traits, and a second woman provides mitochondrial DNA, which is thought to control basic cell functions), the technique is also referred to as “three-parent IVF,” a term almost as controversial (as journalist and physician Emily Senay points out in the video above) as the procedure itself.
In the clip from the 2014 World Science Festival program “Designer Genes: Fashioning Our Biological Future,” fertility specialists Paula Amato and Jamie Grifo discussed the science behind this technique.
Featured image credit: iStock / comugurhan
By: World Science Festival Staff
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via Making a Baby With Three Parents – World Science Festival.