Chinese doctor behind ‘three-parent baby’ fights regulations to help couples have babies, but at what cost?
Pioneering human-reproduction expert John Zhang champions innovative fertility procedures that will ‘benefit mankind’
When future historians look back on the 21st century, one of the most iconic photos may be of a smiling, dark-haired man in blue scrubs protectively holding a newborn – the world’s first commercially produced “three-parent” baby.
The man is John Zhang, the Chinese-born, British-educated founder and medical director of a Manhattan fertility centre that is radically changing the way humans reproduce.
In 2009, Zhang helped a 49-year-old patient become the world’s oldest known in-vitro mother to carry her own child. In the not-too-distant future, he says, 60-year-old women will be able to do the same.
In 2015, Zhang stunned his scientific peers by transferring a genetically “abnormal” embryo to the womb of a woman who had run out of other options. Abnormal embryos – which appear to have the wrong number of chromosomes – are almost universally considered non-viable and discarded by other fertility doctors. The woman gave birth to a healthy baby girl, prompting clinics around the world to re-evaluate their policies.
But it was the three-parent baby that really put Zhang on the map. Working with a Jordanian couple who had lost six babies – two in infancy, four through miscarriages – to Leigh syndrome, a heritable neurological disorder, Zhang put to practical use a procedure that others had dared to try only on animals.
If there is a gene which causes a problem, it would be washed out through natural evolution [...] That is how nature selects. But if we can alter the gene, why can’t we alter it?