This week the Guardian broke the news of a first in the field of fertility science in the UK.

The first baby created from three genetic parents has been born in the UK. The breakthrough is aimed at stopping

a mother passing on defective genes to a child.

The pioneering technique developed by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Center is known as mitochondrial donation treatment or MDT.

Mitochondria provide energy to the cell and fuel the body.

So when these are abnormal, a person can be severely affected.

This could be anything from brain damage, muscle wasting, heart failure to blindness.

Conditions can even be fatal within days or even hours of birth.

So this new technique holds a lot of promise for those impacted. But there are still plenty of unknowns about long-term outcomes,

what these changes could mean for subsequent generations

and how the technology could be applied in the future.

From the Guardian I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.

Darren Griffin, you're a professor of genetics at the University of Kent and you've done lots of research into genetic diseases and reproduction. So I'm keen to understand how significant this news is that the first baby has been born in the

UK with DNA from three people.

Yeah, it's worth unpacking it a little bit because it's a technology that we've known

about for some time.

So I've been aware of it for about 10 years,

10 years, but it was been talked about before then.

In many ways, it's a very obvious thing to do.

The technology itself isn't a million miles from the so-called cloning technology, the nuclear

transfer.

We were certainly aware from conferences that this treatment was happening, we were certainly

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