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FUTURE HUMAN
The Babies at the Fringes of Fertility Tech
Beyond the reach of U.S. law, doctors are changing the way babies are made
It’s 10:30 p.m. in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Dr. Valery Zukin is at the hospital with a patient who needs emergency surgery. The patient is 31 weeks pregnant and has intestinal obstruction — a rare complication that’s potentially fatal in pregnant women. Zukin says the situation is under control, but he’s exhausted, and the stakes are high.
Earlier that day, Zukin had been at a fertility conference in Barcelona, where his groundbreaking fertility treatments made him and his colleagues the stars of the show. Now he’s sitting in a pale-yellow room at the Leleka Maternity Hospital, where he is CEO. Zukin is conferring with a team of doctors about how to save the young woman’s life — and her baby’s.
Zukin is accustomed to this kind of emergency. He’s one of the first embryologists in Ukraine, and as a leader in assisted reproductive technology, he’s part of a small cadre of doctors specializing in a revolutionary fertility technology known as mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT). It’s promise: to make healthy babies possible for couples who are infertile or carry debilitating genetic disorders.
Though tonight’s patient got pregnant the old-fashioned way, Zukin and his colleagues are breaking new ground in radical fertility tech what seems like every other month. No stranger to controversy, Dr. John Zhang, Zukin’s partner at the aptly named clinic Darwin Life-Nadiya, is the first-known scientist to help a woman give birth to a baby who has three genetic parents using one of these techniques. In the United States, where Zhang works, the technique is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is illegal — so Zhang went to Mexico.
Using MRT, Zhang created the embryo in New York and then flew back to Mexico with the fertilized egg and implanted it in a patient there. The announcement of the baby’s birth in 2016 rattled the world, but the blowback hasn’t deterred them. Zukin and Zhang are already working on the next crop of so-called three-parent babies — they’re just doing it beyond the short arm of U.S. law, in places like Ukraine and Mexico.
