2 Women Cannot Repro-

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U.S. regulators on Friday warned a New York fertility doctor to stop marketing an experimental procedure that uses DNA from three people — a mother, a father and an egg donor — to avoid certain genetic diseases.

The procedure is not approved in the U.S., and Congress has barred the FDA from even reviewing proposals to conduct such experiments.

The experimental technique involves removing some of the mother’s DNA from an egg, and leaving the disease-causing DNA behind. The healthy DNA gets slipped into a donor’s egg, which is then fertilized. As a result, the baby inherits DNA from both parents and the egg donor — producing what’s been called “three-parent babies” — though the DNA contribution from the egg donor is very small.

British regulators last year approved “cautious use” of the technique, and this year issued its first license to use it.
The child born last year through Zhang’s clinic is not the first to inherit DNA from three people. In the 1990s, some children were born after researchers used a different technique. But federal regulators intervened, and the field’s interest now has passed to the new approach.