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.
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
Aggregated News
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
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