UK Set to Legalize Babies With DNA From 3 Parents
By KQED,
KQED Radio [With CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
| 02. 06. 2015
Download audio (MP3)
After a parliamentary vote earlier this week, the United Kingdom is set to become the first country to legalize making a baby with DNA from three parents. The controversial procedure, which prevents mothers from passing on genetic diseases to their children, involves replacing faulty DNA in a mother's eggs with healthy DNA from a third person. Critics say the procedure raises many ethical questions. But British Prime Minister David Cameron said, "We're not playing God here, we're just making sure that two parents who want a healthy baby can have one." We'll discuss the technology and explore whether the U.S. and other countries may follow Britain's lead.
Host: Mina Kim
Guests:
- Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences and law professor at Stanford University
- Marcelle Cedars, professor and director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility at UCSF
- Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society
More info:
Related Articles
By Diaa Hadid and Shweta Desai, NPR | 01.29.2026
MUMBRA, India — The afternoon sun shines on the woman in a commuter-town café, highlighting her almond-shaped eyes and pale skin, a look often sought after by couples who need an egg to have a baby.
"I have good eggs,"...
By Shobita Parthasarathya, Science | 01.22.2026
These are extraordinarily challenging times for university researchers across the United States. After decades of government largess based on the idea that a large and well-financed research ecosystem will produce social and economic progress, there have been huge cuts in...
Group of Tuskegee Experiment test subjects
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons
Every generation needs to learn about what is commonly known as the Tuskegee syphilis study, which ran from 1932 to 1972. (Officially, it was the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee, Alabama, which gets the emphasis right.) For many people, the history is hard to believe, though it is hardly unique. Of the 600 subjects, all Black men, 399 had syphilis, for which...
By Evelina Johansson Wilén, Jacobin | 01.18.2026
In her book The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson describes pregnancy as an experience marked by a peculiar duality. On the one hand, it is deeply transformative, bodily alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible to the person undergoing it. On the other hand...