Three-Parent Baby Pioneer Jamie Grifo: ‘The Brits Will be Ahead of the World’
By Steve Connor,
The Independent
| 01. 16. 2015
Untitled Document
The fertility doctor who created the world’s first “three-parent” embryos which led to a woman becoming pregnant with twins has insisted that the technique is safe despite the mother losing both prematurely-born babies.
Jamie Grifo, the programme director of the New York University Fertility Centre, supervised the only IVF treatment that led to a pregnancy with embryos conceived by the same technique being considered by Britain’s fertility watchdog, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).
The 30-year-old Chinese woman underwent the IVF treatment at the SunYat-Sen University Hospital in Guangzhou, China, and became pregnant in 2003 with triplets after five “three-parent” IVF embryos were transferred into her womb.
Doctors subsequently removed one of the foetuses to give the other two babies a better chance of survival but both these twins died after being born prematurely at 24 and 29 weeks respectively.
When Dr Grifo reported her case at a fertility conference later in 2003, he was widely denounced for carrying out an unsafe experiment of the “three-parent” technique and was prohibited from carrying out further IVF trials.
However...
Related Articles
By Gaia Ghirardi, Arno Van Hootegem & K. Paige Harden , Nature Human Behaviour | 09.21.2026
Embryo screening for behavioural traits is no longer speculative. If you want to become a parent in the USA today, you can pay to use pre-implantation polygenic testing (PGT-P) of in vitro fertilization (IVF)-created embryos. PGT-P promises to optimize offspring...
By Ann E. Marimow and J. David Goodman, The New York Times | 09.22.2026
Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday refused to intervene in a high-profile custody battle that involved difficult questions surrounding surrogacy and abortion, leaving in place a lower-court order that gave custody to the biological parents in the dispute.
The case drew...
By Gay Pasley, Essence | 09.04.2026
That is what makes the unfolding case of McKenna West so important. It is more than a disagreement about abortion or a dispute over a surrogacy contract. It asks whether an agreement signed before a pregnancy can become authority...
By Ava Kofman, The New Yorker | 09.15.2026
A WOMAN WHO ACTS AS A SURROGATE, carrying a child for someone else, is said to be going on a “journey.”
Kayla Elliott started her surrogacy journey at the age of twenty-six. She gave birth to a baby girl for...
