Clinic Claims Success In Making Babies With 3 Parents' DNA

npr

In a clinic on a side street in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, doctors are doing something that, as far as is publicly known, is being done nowhere else in the world: using DNA from three different people to create babies for women who are infertile.

"If you can help these families to achieve their own babies, why it must be forbidden?" Valery Zukin, director of the Nadiya Clinic, asks as he peers over his glasses. "It is a dream to want to have a genetic connection with a baby."

I traveled to Ukraine because Zukin promised unusual access to his private fertility clinic, including the first demonstration for a U.S. journalist of how scientists create "three-parent" babies — a procedure prohibited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Zukin also arranged the first-ever interview with a mother of a 15-month-old boy who is one of the four children he says he has produced this way.

Three more of his patients are pregnant, Zukin says, including a woman from Sweden. Women from several other countries including Britain, Brazil and Israel are going through the process, he says.

Leading ethicists and genetics researchers criticize the clinic for rushing ahead to use this method for infertility. No one knows whether children produced this way will be healthy, they say. And some worry the procedure may open the door to "designer babies."