Baby born from three people's DNA in UK first

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-65538866 

A slightly misleading headline, as it means 'first time in UK' - the procedure has been carried out elsewhere previously. 

I don't have a problem with injection of a third person's DNA to cure mitochondrial disease, any more than, say, with blood transfusions, and it is expected that the functioning mitochondrial DNA would be inherited by this child's offspring in due course so no need to repeat this in every future generation. Here and now, this is great news for the baby's parents.

So is the problem completely sorted? A word of caution from a couple of statements in the article:
- There has been no word from the teams in Newcastle so it is still uncertain whether the technique was successful. So watch and wait, no problem in principle
-There is technically a risk of "reversion" where any defective mitochondria that are carried over could gain in number and still result in disease. This is more serious as it is contrary to the expectation of inheritance above, and there is the possibility that defective mitochondrial DNA could be inherited by future generations, so eventually more widely into the population. This possibility really does need careful checks at some considerably later time, and I hope it's not overlooked.

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The history of Mitochondria is mind boggling: 
The Origin of Mitochondria
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mitochondria-14232356/ 

"Mitochondria originated by permanent enslavement of purple non-sulphur bacteria. These endosymbionts became organelles through the origin of complex protein-import machinery and insertion into their inner membranes of protein carriers for extracting energy for the host."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1634775/ 
 

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In 1960 when I was doing a biochemistry course as an option within a Chemistry degree, the idea of mitochondria once having been free-living but having become symbionts in the cell was being floated.  It was regarded as a piece of outrageous speculation then, but the idea has now 'evolved' to become accepted fact.

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I have a very inadequate mental picture of what life forms were like before the leap to mitochondrial symbiosis. I expect lichens feel a bit like that too. 😁

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