The New Scientist has revealed that the world’s first baby born from new procedure using DNA of three people has occurred in Mexico.
The report says the procedure “allows parents with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies”.
The baby, Abrahim Hassan was born on 6 April after his Jordanian parents travelled to Mexico where a team of US doctors oversaw a controversial procedure of mitochondrial transfer in the hope that it would give the couple a healthy child.
According to the report, the boy’s mother is a carrier of Leigh syndrome, which is a rare and fatal disease which attacks the nervous system. The couple had reportedly suffered four miscarriages and lost two children – a girl at six and another at eight months – and tests later revealed that one quarter of the mother’s mitochondria carried the genes for Leigh syndrome.
While the Mitochondrial transfer was legalised in the UK in 2015 no other countries have followed suit to officially legalise it. The doctors who performed the procedure are coming under scrutiny for performing the procedure in Mexico, away from strict medical regulators.
But John Zhang, from the New Hope Fertility Center in New York who led the team overseeing Abrahim’s birth, told New Scientist they went to Mexico because “there are no rules” and defended his position because, “To save lives is the ethical thing to do,” he said.
Of the case Dusko Ilic, a stem cell scientist at King’s College London, told The Guardian that while the procedure produced a healthy baby, he question the reasons why doctors wouldn’t want to subject the technique to “the same stringent regulation as some other countries would insist on.”
The expert called the doctor’s Mexico location “risky” and raised questions about what went into producing a healthy baby from this case of Mitochondrial transfer.
“Was this the first time ever they performed the technique or were there other attempts and they are reporting this one because it was successful?
Mr Ilic asked: “Was this the first time ever they performed the technique or were there other attempts and they are reporting this one because it was successful?
“This and other important questions remain unanswered because this work has not been published and the rest of the scientific community has been unable to examine it in detail. It’s vital that that happens soon.”
