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LONDON - British couples could soon be able to have babies created using DNA from two women and a man as part of a revolutionary human cloning technique.
Controversial legislation due to be debated by politicians this week sets out ways to allow test-tube babies to be created from the biological material from three parents.
The laws would allow an embryo to be created from the nucleus of one woman's egg, her partner's sperm and another woman's mitochondria, the material surrounding an egg's nucleus and which promotes cell growth.
The Independent on Sunday said if the controversial legislation was approved, babies created using the cloning technique could be born within the next decade.
Many politicians and church leaders were expected to oppose the new laws, arguing they effectively pave the way for the first human clones and remove the need for a father in the upbringing of a child.
But scientists claim the new procedure was designed to help find a cure for mitochondrial disease, which can lead to epilepsy, diabetes and fatal damage to various organs.
Researchers at the North of England Stem Cell Research Centre in Newcastle said trials to create babies using the new technique could begin within five years.
"The current work involves transplanting the healthy nucleus from a fertilised egg with damaged mitochondria into a donor egg with healthy mitochondria," the head of reproductive medicine at Newcastle University, Professor Alison Murdoch, told the newspaper.
"We continue to investigate whether transplanting the nucleus from an unfertilised unhealthy egg into an egg before fertilisation would be as effective," Professor Murdoch said.
"We are not yet at the stage of clinical trials but we would anticipate that in the lifetime of this bill we would be.
"It's a cure for mitochondrial diseases we are working on."
But those opposed to the new laws said they contradict laws introduced in 2001 to ban human cloning.
Church leaders were concerned the laws could lead to a breakdown in family life because they remove the need for fathers to have any involvement in the upbringing of a child conceived by lesbian couples using IVF.
"The bill proposes to remove the need for IVF providers to take into account the child's need for a father when considering an IVF application," the cardinal archbishop of Westminster, cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor told the Mail on Sunday.
"This is profoundly wrong as it radically undermines the place of the father in a child's life and makes the natural rights of the child subordinate to the couple's desires."
- AAP
