UK is set to allow mitochondrial donation after MPs vote in favour

The United Kingdom is on course to become the first country to allow in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to create babies using biological material from three people to prevent serious inherited disease, after MPs voted overwhelmingly in favour of the procedure.

The House of Commons voted by 382 to 128 to approve regulations allowing mitochondrial donation, after MPs were given a free vote of conscience on the issue. The Conservative led government and the Labour front bench both made clear that they saw the move as an important scientific advance for families that are blighted by mitochondrial disease and that it did not amount to genetic modification.

The regulations still need the go ahead of the House of Lords, but peers are expected to pass them. Once they come into force they will permit the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to issue licences allowing clinics to use the techniques.1

Jane Ellison, public health minister, told MPs that mitochondrial DNA, which sits outside the nucleus of an egg, made up only 0.054% of a person’s DNA and comprised none of the nuclear DNA that determines personal characteristics and traits. She said that the techniques provided the only hope for some women to have “healthy, genetically related children” without the “devastating and often fatal consequences” of mitochondrial disease, which is passed on to children by the mother.

The regulations will allow the use of two techniques. One is maternal spindle transfer, which involves removing the nucleus of an egg from an anonymous donor and replacing it with the nucleus from the mother’s egg. In the second, pronuclear transfer, both eggs are fertilised, and the nuclear DNA from the mother’s fertilised egg is transferred to the fertilised donor egg from which the nuclear DNA has been removed.

Opposition in the Commons was led by Fiona Bruce, a Conservative MP who argued that parliament needed more time to debate the issues. She said, “I believe the regulations before us today fail on both counts, ethics and safety, and they are inextricably linked.”

She told MPs, “[This] will be passed down generations. The implications of this simply cannot be predicted . . . Once the genie is out of the bottle, once these procedures that we’re asked to authorise today go ahead, there will be no going back for society.”

The Commons vote came after a public consultation,2 as well as a review by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics that concluded that the procedures would be ethical if adequately shown to be safe,3 and scientific reviews by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which recommended that the techniques be considered “not unsafe.”4 The first licence is expected to be granted to Newcastle University, where the techniques were pioneered.

Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, said, “This is a vote of confidence in the patients, scientists, doctors, and ethicists who have worked hard for a decade to explain this complex research to politicians, the public, and the media, and in the exemplary process for reviewing scientific, ethical, and public opinion led by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.”