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WASHINGTON (AP) — Creating babies from the DNA of three people — a man and two women — one day might prevent mothers from passing on devastating genetic diseases, and advisers to the government now say it's ethical to test the procedure under certain conditions. At issue is a kind of DNA that children can inherit only from mom, not dad: genes that are inside the mitochondria, the energy factories in cells. Britain last year became the first country to allow use of a fertility technique to create embryos by swapping a mother's defective mitochondrial DNA with healthy genetic material from a donor egg. The Food and Drug Administration has been considering whether to allow that so-called mitochondrial replacement technique to be tested in the U.S. But it's controversial, in part because such alterations could be passed to future generations — a scientific boundary that hasn't yet been crossed. In a report requested by the FDA, the prestigious Institute of Medicine said Wednesday that it is ethical to do such research if initial experiments follow certain strict safety steps. They must target women at high risk of passing on a severe disease — and limit the first pregnancy attempts to male embryos. That's because males can't pass any mitochondrial alteration to their own children. Such research won't happen this year, the FDA said in a statement Wednesday. While the agency said it would be "carefully reviewing the report and recommendations," it noted that when Congress passed FDA's 2016 budget, it prohibited using any of the money to review applications involving inheritable genetic modification of embryos. Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University who led the Institute of Medicine panel, said, "It is ethically acceptable to go forward, but go slowly and with great caution." "Mitochondrial DNA disease can be extremely devastating, and for the women who are at risk of passing it on to their children, they have no other option by which to pursue having a child that's genetically related to them," he said. "It's unlikely we'll find any cure once the child is born already with these mutations," said Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Sciences University, the field's leading U.S. researcher who is discussing human studies with the FDA and welcomed Wednesday's report. "The best way is to prevent it."

Report: It's ethical to test embryos from DNA of 3 people