LONDON — Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has approved a study that may one day lead to designer babies, but that's not the plan right now.

Dr. Kathy Niakan, a molecular biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, will lead the experiment. The study will use fertilized eggs that are donated by couples, with the hopes of better understanding fertility problems.

Researchers will use a new genome-editing procedure called CRISPR–Cas9 to turn genes on or off. This process uses specially programmed RNA to cut and remove snippets of faulty DNA to be replaced with healthy DNA. The embryos will be monitored over the course of 7 days as they grow from a single cell to about 250 cells.

Critics say this could be the first step toward genetically modified humans.

Dr. Niakan told The Guardian, "It is up to society to decide what is acceptable: science will merely inform what may be possible."

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