Reproduction 3.0

The House of Lords in the United Kingdom voted to allow fertility clinics to  apply for licenses to perform “mitochondrial donation” IVF procedures on Tuesday. The UK is the first nation to explicitly allow the procedure, which it had previously banned; the resulting child would have genetic material from her parents and also from a donor of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), with the aim of avoiding transmission of debilitating mitochondrial disease from mother to child. The procedure has never been performed in humans.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is considering clinical trials to test the procedure in humans, and is conducting inquiry into safety as well as ethical and social policy considerations.

The procedure is considered controversial because some say it would cross the “germ line,” or make a permanent, engineered change to the DNA that is passed down from mother to child. Previously this has been seen as an ethical line not to be crossed, but recently scientists and ethics scholars have come out in favor of its potential to allow...