UK lawmakers pass three-parent babies bill

British lawmakers passed a bill Tuesday that would allow scientists to use techniques to create babies from the DNA of three people, a move that could prevent children from inheriting potentially fatal diseases. Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of the measure, putting the United Kingdom on course to becoming the first country in the world to permit embryos to be genetically modified.

Three-parent in vitro fertilization (IVF) aims to prevent mothers from passing on inherited diseases and involves altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into the mother. British legislation currently forbids any modification of embryos before they are transferred into a woman, and critics see it as a step toward creating so-called designer babies. The 382-128 vote in favor of allowing the techniques means that the bill now needs to be approved by the House of Lords before becoming law.

The U.K. government published rules in December on how the techniques should be used. The country’s chief medical officer, Dr. Sally Davies, said they should be legalized "to give women who carry severe mitochondrial disease the opportunity to have children without passing on devastating genetic disorders."

Defects in the mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell's nucleus, can result in diseases such as muscular dystrophy, severe muscle weakness and heart, kidney and liver failure.

International charities and advocacy groups urged Britain to pass laws to allow the treatments, saying Tuesday's vote offers a glimmer of hope of having a baby that can live without suffering.

In an open letter to lawmakers, the U.S.-based United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation, the Australian Mitochondrial Disease Foundation and groups from France, Germany, Britain and Spain described mitochondrial disease as "unimaginably cruel.”

"It strips our children of the skills they have learned, inflicts pain that cannot be managed and tires their organs one by one until their little bodies cannot go on any more," they wrote.

Critics, however, say the techniques cross a fundamental scientific boundary, since the changes made to the embryos will be passed on to future generations. They say approving these techniques could lead to the creation of designer babies.

"[This is] about protecting children from the severe health risks of these unnecessary techniques and protecting everyone from the eugenic designer baby future that will follow from this," said David King, director of the secular watchdog group Human Genetics Alert.

The techniques would likely be used about a dozen times a year by British women with faulty mitochondria. In the procedure, scientists remove the nuclear DNA — before or after fertilization — from the egg of a prospective mother and insert it into a donor egg whose nuclear DNA has been removed. 

The resulting embryo has the nuclear DNA from its parents and the mitochondrial DNA from the donor. Scientists say the DNA from the donor egg amounts to less than 1 percent of the resulting embryo's genes.

Last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration held a meeting to discuss the techniques, and scientists warned it could take decades to determine if they are safe.

Wire services