How many parents do you have? a) 1 b) 2 c) 3

Odd coincidence today, as the BBC runs two bits of news on fertilisation jiggery-pokery.

First, the Roslin Institute has produced human pre-embryos from unfertilised ova. Here's the BBC report; the idea, as far as I understand it, is that you prod the ova until they become exasperated and start dividing. They've got up to fifty-cell blastocysts. The aim is to produce stem cells for research, but I suppose that in theory one could take them to term and produce a haploid baby - risk of genetic disorders, as every defective recessive gene would be expressed. The baby would of course be female. Obviously, babies that develop from an unfertilised ovum would have only one set of chromosomes, and potentially could be the product of a virgin birth. Hence the phrase "Jesus H. Christ" in which the H obviously stands for Haploid.

And now, on to babies with three parents! This is from the Geordies, who are transplanting healthy cytoplasm from an ovum into a zygote with an inherited disorder on the mDNA. The baby ends up with two sets of nuclear DNA (from mother and father) and mDNA from a completely different woman. Very cool also.