AKIPRESS.COM - Britain moved Tuesday toward allowing scientists to create humans from the DNA of three people.

The technology aims to liberate future generations from inherited diseases, but critics say it crosses a fundamental scientific boundary and could lead to "designer babies," reports The Associated Press.

The U.K.'s House of Commons voted 382-178 in favor of legislation to license these experiments. If approved in the House of Lords, Britain would become the world's first nation to allow genetic modifications in human embryos.

The technology is completely different from that used to create genetically modified foods, where scientists typically select individual genes to be transferred from one species into another. But critics say it crosses a red line, since changes made to embryos will be passed on to future generations, with the potential for unforeseen consequences.

The technology altering a human egg or embryo before transferring it into a mother with defects in her mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell's nucleus. These genetic defects can result in diseases including muscular dystrophy, heart, kidney and liver failure and severe muscle weakness.

Scientists would remove the nucleus DNA from the egg of the prospective mother and insert it into a donor egg from which the nucleus DNA has been removed. The resulting embryo would have the nucleus DNA from its parents but the mitochondrial DNA from the donor. This can be done two ways — before or after fertilization — in the techniques approved by the Commons.

Scientists say more than 99 percent of the DNA in the resulting child would come from its parents, with a tiny fraction coming from the donor egg.