Fetus Has Two Mommies

Julian Sanchez | September 8, 2005

So, a few years back, I saw a short film by Xavier Domingo—a family friend who'd given up medicine for acting, much of it in weird little arthouse films—called Amazons. Xavier played a series of characters (a scientist in a lab coat, a dude, a wealthy housewife, a mime) who, in a series of interconnected monologues, discuss the looming superfluity of men, thanks to the possibility of using genetic technology to crossfertilize two ova, producing (obviously) invariably female offspring.

Well, we're not quite there yet, but the BBC is reporting on a British experiment involving the transplantation of old-fashioned sperm/egg genetic material into a new ova, which scientists hope could avoid illnesses transmitted through mitochondrial DNA.