TIME Ideas health Three-Parent IVF Deserves a Chance in the U.S. All new fertility methods sound crazy at first In a historic vote that rocked the world of fertility medicine Tuesday, British lawmakers approved the use of a controversial IVF practice that would take genetic material from three people to create a single embryo. The promising technique, which involves replacing the defective cellular material of a womans eggs with that from a healthy donor, aims to prevent patients from passing down crippling genetic diseases to their offspring. It also might hold the key to other groundbreaking applications, such as extending womens fertility by rehabilitating old eggs. The decision is inspiring because members of Parliament chose science over a firestorm of often ill-informed debate questioning whether weve gone too far in experimenting with genetic engineering. Hopefully, they will motivate the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which held public hearings on the topic last year but declined to move forward with human trials citing lack of safety data, to follow suit. New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that more than 12,000 women in the U. S. of childbearing age risk passing down such mitochondrial diseases, which have … Continue reading →