Three parents? Sorry, but this is science gone mad Some people do suffer dreadfully from mitochondrial problems, including blindness and heart disease. But what we'd be doing here in the efforts to help them have healthy children is conducting genetic modification on a human being, with permanent results. We're manipulating life and our genetic material in a way that will go down the generations. In creating a three-parent baby, we're doing something that other countries haven't done for good reasons. The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine allows modifications to the human genome "only if its aim is not to introduce any modification in the genome of any descendants." This is exactly what Parliament is likely to authorise. And although Dame Sally says there is "general support" from the public for change, that's not what the consultation figures show: half of respondents oppose a change in the law. Of the three parents of the offspring that British scientists want to create, it's not quite true that the third is a cipher. The mitochondria of a cell, the bit the healthy mother would provide, may provide only about 37 genes out of around 2,000, but it contains about half of the actual biological make-up of a cell. What's more, its genes relate to how effectively our metabolism functions, an important aspect of our physiology. The nucleus and the mitochondria in a cell, one scientist explained to me, don't operate separately; they talk to each other all the time. The third-parent bit matters. One child in 6,500, on average, is affected by serious mitochondrial problems, which may be where Dame Sally got her figure of 10 babies with "ghastly diseases" who will be "saved." Except they won't be saved. Instead, this technique creates entirely different, disease-free children. If it works, that is. The favoured process that Newcastle University hopes to adopt isn't very different from the one used to clone Dolly the sheep, which wasn't blessed with entire success. It's risky. When researchers in Oregon tried the approach on monkeys, the embryos failed early on. But this being Britain, the great thing is to push the boundaries of science ever further on the off-chance that something will come of it. This, after all, is a country that legalised the creation of animal-human hybrids in 2008, which didn't work either, but demonstrated that here, pretty well anything goes if you can promise that sick children will benefit. Questions of identity, ethics, likely success, none of it matters so long as - as one paper put it - "Britain is leading the world." Down a slippery slope, unfortunately.