TWENTY children have been born after doctors performed a kind of transplant surgery on the eggs of their mothers, for whom normal IVF had failed. But other experts are concerned about the long-term safety of the technique.
The technique, developed by Chii-Ruey Tzeng’s team at Taipei Medical University in Taiwan, involves adding more of the power-generating components of cells, called mitochondria, to eggs. The team extract mitochondria from the granulosa cells that surround eggs and inject around 3000 into each egg.
This addition has a dramatic effect. In a group of women for whom IVF and ICSI had failed, it…
