Here is an article in BBC about how they have approved a procedure that to me sounds basically one step away from cloning.
It is not cloning because what they are doing is transferring a newly fertilized nucleus to a second egg to bypass a mitochondrial disease but isn't this basically the same step as transferring nuclear material from other sources?
http://news.bbc.co.u...lth/4225564.stm
Embryo with two mothers approved
The aim is to get healthy offspring free of inherited genetic disorders. UK scientists have won permission to create a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers. The Newcastle University team will transfer genetic material created when an egg and sperm fuse into another woman's egg.
The groundbreaking work aims to prevent mothers from passing certain genetic diseases on to their unborn babies.
Such diseases arise from DNA found outside the nucleus, and thus inherited separately from DNA in the nucleus.
They are collectively called mitochondrial diseases.
Studies in mice show it is possible to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease by moving the pronuclei - the genetic material which will go on to form a nucleus - from a fertilised egg containing bad mitochondria and putting it into another fertilised egg which only contains good mitochondria.
Professor Doug Turnbull, professor of neurology at Newcastle University, and Dr Mary Herbert, scientific director of Newcastle Fertility Centre at the city's Centre for Life, now plan to do the same in humans.
US scientists at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas, New Jersey, reported back in 2001 that they had successfully done similar, giving rise to 15 healthy children who appeared to be free of their mothers' disease.
Safety check
Instead of transplanting the pronuclei, these researchers injected another woman's ooplasm - the substance inside the cell that contains the mitochondrial DNA and bathes the nucleus - into the egg cell of the mother with faulty mitochondrial DNA.
