U.K. approves first three-parent baby clinic

British regulators granted a license to create three-parent babies to the Newcastle Fertility Centre last week, the first such license issued since the country approved the practice last December. The clinic’s professor of reproductive biology called it “great news” and said doctors “hope to offer treatment to the first parents from the summer.” Anthony McCarthy with the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children called the news “depressing,” since it “entrenches the idea that eggs can be bought from women who will be cut off from the children to whom they also will have some genetic link.” The method, mitochondrial replacement therapy, uses the sperm from a father, the egg nucleus of a mother, and egg mitochondria from a second woman. It has been used successfully in the past to side-step genetic defects passed down in the mother’s mitochondria, but researchers don’t yet know what effects such genetic changes will have on future generations. The first three-parent babies in Britain could be born next year.