LONDON – Britain is inviting the public to weigh in on draft rules allowing scientists to create embryos using DNA from three people – a man and two women – to prevent mothers from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases.
The latest public review should be the last step before politicians consider changing the law to let doctors offer the new fertilization techniques to patients. That would make Britain the first country in the world to allow the procedure to help people have children.
Britain’s department of health said Thursday the government hopes to gather as many views as possible before introducing its final regulations. The proposed rules have been published online and the government is inviting people to respond by late May.
The public input isn’t meant to debate whether the controversial techniques should be permitted. Instead, it concerns how they should be used to prevent relatively rare diseases caused by DNA defects in parts of the cell called mitochondria. Mistakes in the mitochondria’s genetic code can result in diseases such as muscular dystrophy, epilepsy, heart problems and mental retardation.
Mitochondria are energy-producing structures outside the cell’s nucleus. The new techniques involve removing the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and inserting it into a donor egg, from which the nucleus DNA has been removed. That happens either before or after fertilization.