Giving Compass' Take:

• TIME magazine reports on a fertility treatment called mitochondrial replacement therapy that may help eliminate a rare, deadly disease in infants — but the procedure comes with controversy.

• Should we be funding more research connected with gene editing? What are the moral ramifications — and might the breakthroughs that emerge compensate for them?

• Here's how some scientists are engineering bacteria to treat genetic diseases.

When Noah Shulman was born a few days after Christmas 2016, his parents Kristelle and Evan had no reason to worry about him. The pregnancy went smoothly, and so did the birth.

But within a few days of taking his first breath, Noah began to struggle. He wasn’t feeding, so he started losing weight. He was also lethargic. Several pediatricians reassured the Shulmans that they were probably just overly sensitive to Noah’s symptoms because Kristelle is a nurse and Evan is a physician assistant — a case of first-time-parent-white-coat syndrome. “They kind of dismissed us as neurotic parents,” says Evan.

But when Noah strained to breathe, the alarmed Shulmans took him to the emergency room, and he spent the next few months in the hospital. After a harrowing month of medical emergencies that included seizures and a heart attack, the Shulmans learned that their son had a rare genetic disease that affected his mitochondria.

About 1 in 4,000 people worldwide — 20,000 in the U.S. — have mitochondrial diseases. Mitochondria are present in nearly every cell in the human body, and they provide energy for everything cells do, acting as the body’s molecular batteries ...

Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) is a promising innovation in fertility treatments that could allow couples like the Shulmans to have healthy children. It involves replacing just the mutated mitochondria with healthy mitochondrial DNA from a donor, while keeping the biological mother’s and father’s DNA intact.

Read the full article about mitochondrial replacement therapy by Alice Park at time.com.