Three-Parent Baby Pioneer Jamie Grifo: ‘The Brits Will be Ahead of the World’
By Steve Connor,
The Independent
| 01. 16. 2015
Untitled Document
The fertility doctor who created the world’s first “three-parent” embryos which led to a woman becoming pregnant with twins has insisted that the technique is safe despite the mother losing both prematurely-born babies.
Jamie Grifo, the programme director of the New York University Fertility Centre, supervised the only IVF treatment that led to a pregnancy with embryos conceived by the same technique being considered by Britain’s fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).
The 30-year-old Chinese woman underwent the IVF treatment at the SunYat-Sen University Hospital in Guangzhou, China, and became pregnant in 2003 with triplets after five “three-parent” IVF embryos were transferred into her womb.
Doctors subsequently removed one of the foetuses to give the other two babies a better chance of survival but both these twins died after being born prematurely at 24 and 29 weeks respectively.
When Dr Grifo reported her case at a fertility conference later in 2003, he was widely denounced for carrying out an unsafe experiment of the “three-parent” technique and was prohibited from carrying out further IVF trials.
However...
Related Articles
By Anna Collinson and Jo Adnitt, BBC | 08.18.2026
At least 30 children, most of them British, are feared to have been conceived by IVF treatment in northern Cyprus using the wrong sperm or egg donors.
In each case, the parents suspect they did not get the donors they...
By Dan Falk, Nautilus | 08.20.2026
The pseudoscience of eugenics, founded on the mistaken notion that nature envisions some “right” combination of genes, and that selective breeding can improve the human race, is making a comeback. While the heyday of eugenics was a century ago, the...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times | 08.21.2026
Since in vitro fertilization was invented nearly 50 years ago, at least 10 million children who would not otherwise exist have been brought into the world. New constellations of families — older moms, same-sex parents, single dads — have flourished...
By Jenni Fink, Newsweek | 08.19.2026
“Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
President Donald Trump's latest effort to limit birthright citizenship could have consequences for the international surrogacy industry, potentially affecting thousands of intended parents from overseas who travel...
