[Straits Network]
Reference news network reported on April 13 that a baby boy with a length of 51 centimeters and a weight of 2.9 kilograms was born in a hospital in Greece on the 9th, and his DNA came from two mothers and a father, which was synthesized with the help of the medical team of the Spanish "Embryo Tool" Reproductive Center.
According to the Spanish newspaper Le Monde website reported on April 11, like others, half of the baby boy's 46 chromosomes came from his mother and the other half from his father, but the trace amount of genetic material outside the nucleus in his cells came from the second mother, who donated eggs. Using the technique, called prokaryotic transplantation, scientists helped conceive the world's first and so far only baby with three parents in 2016, born in Mexico with the technical help of the U.S. medical team, whose parents are Jordanians. Unlike the three-parent baby born in 2016, the baby born in Greece was not to avoid a disease inherited through the mother's DNA, but because his infertile parents wanted a child who inherited his own genes.
"In this example, we use prokaryotic transfer techniques to help women who are infertile due to oocyte development problems," Gloria Calderon, a doctor at the Fertility Center for Embryo Tools in Barcelona, told reporters.
The baby's mother, 32 years old, is Greek, suffered infertility due to severe endometriosis undergoing two surgeries and undergoing 4 IVF treatments without success. However, the above pioneering technology made her a successful mother.
Medical personnel first remove the meiosis spindle (nucleus) from the patient's unfertilized oocyte (immature egg), which contains DNA, and then implant it into the healthy oocytes of the donor whose nucleus has been removed in advance. The eggs produced in this way contain the patient's genetic material, but the remaining components that play a key role in embryonic development come from a healthy donor. Finally, this ovule is fertilized with the father's sperm and implanted into the patient's body.
Currently, the UK is the only country that has approved this technology legally. However, the technique is only allowed for therapeutic purposes to prevent mitochondrial disease, which is inherited through 1% of the mother's DNA. The Greek couple accepted the pioneering experiment after receiving government approval.
The medical team led by Gloria Calderon has demonstrated the safety of this technology through rat experiments over the past 6 years, but there are still some experts who criticize the technology for lacking sufficient scientific support, and in the cases mentioned above, medical personnel did not fully assess the risk. It must be noted that the problem of infertility can be solved through egg donation, which has long been common in hospitals around the world.