Eight healthy babies who have genes derived from three different parents have been born healthy in the United Kingdom. This happy result was reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. The treatment involved taking the nucleus from a fertilized egg that contained defective mitochondria and installing it into a donor egg with healthy mitochondria whose nucleus had been removed.

Eight healthy babies were born in Britain with the help of an experimental technique that uses DNA from three people to help mothers avoid passing devastating rare diseases to their children, researchers report.