A brief history of “three-parent babies”
I can’t go any further without talking about the term we use to describe these children. Journalists, myself included, have called them “three-parent babies” because they are created using DNA from three people. Briefly, the approach typically involves using the DNA from the nuclei of the intended parents’ egg and sperm cells. That’s where most of the DNA in a cell is found. But it also makes use of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)—the DNA found in the energy-producing organelles of a cell—from a thir