3-parent babies ‘not unsafe’
This technique was meant to prevent mothers passing on diseases
London: Britain’s fertility regulator have said that controversial techniques to create embryos from the DNA of three people “do not appear to be unsafe” even though no one has ever received the treatment, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The report based its conclusion largely on lab tests and some animal experiments and called for further experiments before patients are treated.
“Until a healthy baby is born, we cannot say 100 per cent that these techniques are safe,” said Dr Andy Greenfield, who chaired the expert panel behind the report.
The techniques are meant to stop mothers from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their babies and involve altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into a woman. Such methods have only been allowed for research in a laboratory, but the UK department of health has said it hopes new legislation will be in place by the end of the year that allows treatment of patients. If approved, Britain would become the first country to allow embryos to be genetically modified this way.
Critics have described the research as unethical and warn the novel technology has unknown dangers.
“Safety is not a straightforward issue,” Greenfield said, comparing the ongoing debate to qualms about in vitro fertilisation in the 1970s before the first test tube baby was born.