Is it OK to make babies from 3 parents’ DNA?

Last Updated Feb 3, 2015 12:10 PM EST

Britain could soon become the first country to allow a controversial technique to create babies from the DNA of three people. Lawmakers in Parliament's House of Commons voted Tuesday to permit embryos to be genetically modified -- a move that could prevent children from inheriting potentially fatal diseases. The bill must next be approved by the House of Lords before becoming law.

The in-vitro fertilization technique involves altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into the mother. Until now, British law had forbidden any such modification. So-called "three-parent IVF" is not approved in the United States, although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating its safety.

The British government published rules in December on how the techniques should be used. The U.K.'s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Sally Davies, said they should be legalized "to give women who carry severe mitochondrial disease the opportunity to have children without passing on devastating genetic disorders."

Defects in the mitochondria can result in diseases including muscular dystrophy, heart, kidney and liver failure and severe muscle weakness.

Critics, however, say the techniques cross a fundamental scientific boundary, since the changes made to the embryos will be passed on to future generations. They have also warned the techniques could lead to the creation of "designer babies."

"(This is) about protecting children from the severe health risks of these unnecessary techniques and protecting everyone from the eugenic designer-baby future that will follow from this," said David King, director of the secular watchdog group Human Genetics Alert.

The techniques would likely only be used in about a dozen British women every year who have faulty mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell's nucleus. To fix that, scientists remove the nucleus DNA from the egg of a prospective mother and insert it into a donor egg from which the nucleus DNA has been removed. This can be done either before or after fertilization.

The resulting embryo would end up with the nucleus DNA from its parents but the mitochondrial DNA from the donor. Scientists say the DNA from the donor egg amounts to a fraction of a percent of the resulting embryo's genes.

The debate leading up to Tuesday's vote grew heated, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips in London. "It would be hard to imagine a more controversial or passionate debate. There was a lot of loaded language in this ... 'designer babies,' 'playing God,' 'three-parent babies,'" Phillips said.

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Is it OK to make babies from 3 parents' DNA?