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.
Couples are needlessly going through IVF because male infertility is under-researched, with the NHS too often failing to diagnose treatable causes, leading experts have said.
Poor understanding among GPs and a lack of specialists and NHS testing means male infertility...
By Pam Belluck and Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 11.19.2025
Aggregated News
Gene-editing therapies offer great hope for treating rare diseases, but they face big hurdles: the tremendous time and resources involved in devising a treatment that might only apply to a small number of patients.
It has been an excellent year for neurotech, if you ignore the people funding it. In August, a tiny brain implant successfully decoded the inner speech of paralysis patients. In October, an eye implant restored sight to patients who had...
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