Scientists Accuse Government of Dishonesty Over GM Babies in its Regulation of new IVF Technique
By Steve Connor,
The Independent
| 07. 28. 2014
Untitled Document
The Government has been accused of misleading the public over the introduction of a new in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technique that some experts believe will result in the birth of “genetically modified babies”.
Leading scientists, including Lord Winston, an early pioneer of fertility treatment, have criticised the Department of Health for trying to play down a process that will for the first time allow the alteration of the DNA of future generations.
They argue that the Government has redefined the term “genetic modification” (GM) to exclude specifically a controversial technique that will result in babies inheriting genetic material from three individuals.
The move, buried within a Department of Health document published last week, is designed to take the sting out of hostility towards mitochondrial donation – a process that aims to avoid the certain inherited diseases being passed on by using healthy mitochondria (microscopic structures in the cell) taken from a donor egg or embryo. Opponents believe that using the healthy donor mitochondria will result in “three-parent embryos” and could usher in an era of “designer babies”...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Kaitlin Sullivan, NBC News | 10.15.2025
Two months after she was born, Eliana Nachem got a cough that wouldn’t go away. Three weeks later, she also started having runny stool, prompting a visit to her pediatrician.
Eliana didn’t have allergies or a gastrointestinal condition; instead, tests...