____Alana Saarinen is your average teenage girl who loves to ride bicycles, play piano and hang out with friends. She is also one of the fifty people in the world who have three biological parents. Yes, you heard correctly! Alanna has in her blood the DNA of two moms and one dad. She was conceived in the U.S. through a controversial infertility treatment called cytoplasmic transfer, which was later banned in the United States.
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Sharon Saarinen, Alana's mom, tried to become pregnant for ten years without success. She tried IVF many times and was disappointed with the results. She felt like half of a woman because she couldn't give birth to a child. She consulted many doctors until she heard of a facility in New Jersey that did mitochondria replacement. Doctor Cohen, the doctor who came up with this procedure, suspected that Saarinen's faulty mitochondria was the reason she couldn't become pregnant so he started the cytoplasmic transfer process. Basically Sharon's egg was implanted with a bit of the donor's cytoplasm containing mitochondria, then the egg was fertilized by Sharon's husband's sperm. When the little bit of mitochondria was transferred, some of the donor's DNA was transferred to the embryo. That's why Alana has three biological parents!
The banned procedure was established at the St. Barnabus Institute in New Jersey in the early nineties by embryologist Dr Jacques Cohen and he was responsible for seventeen births. in 2002 the practice was deemed unethical because DNA from multiple parents was found in the implanted mitochondria. The Food and Drug Administration asked Dr. Cohen to stop the practice, but that was after Alanna's mom got pregnant through a procedure at St. Barnabus.
Alana's DNA is unusual because she has coding from three different people. Critics were concerned that when cytoplasmic girls like Alana gave birth to their own children they will pass their strange DNA and change the genetic code of their kids.
She knows that she shares powerful DNA from another woman, but she doesn't consider her a mother. Alana loves her parents and they think she is the best child in the world. She is smart, kind and they couldn't be happier with her. The United Kingdom is considering legalizing this procedure so in the future many other families will have the chance to become parents just like Sharon did.
Image via Corbis
