This week, I’ve been working on a big story about a controversial treatment that creates babies with three genetic parents. The “three-parent baby” technique was thought to help parents avoid passing diseases on to their kids. But new evidence suggests it doesn’t always work—and could create babies at risk of severe diseases.
The evidence comes from two babies born after the procedure was used to help couples with a different problem: infertility. It’s lucky we found the problem in these cases—these babies didn’t have parents with disease-causing mutations, so they should be fine.
Our genomes are full of mutations that have the potential to damage our health or even kill us. Yet most of them rarely cause problems. Why? It’s partly thanks to a family of proteins that mask, or ‘buffer’, the ill...
Since its molecular structure was deduced in the 1950s, DNA has been hailed by many biologists as the secret of life. They’ve read and studied the information stored in the DNA found in the cells of living organisms, known as...
The European Parliament has voted for a wide-reaching deregulation of New Genomic Techniques (NGTs). There was no majority for amendments stopping patents on conventionally classically bred plants or NGT plants. “Today’s vote is a missed opportunity to protect Europe’s farmers...
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