A Democrat-led spending panel in the U.S. House of Representatives has dropped a provision that banned embryo editing with the intention of creating a baby. The draft bill is still moving through the legislative process, however, and Republicans will likely push to restore the language.

The ban was first added to the law that funded the U.S. government in 2016. It bars the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from considering any clinical trial application “in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.” Although a different “rider” bars the National Institutes of Health from funding human germline editing—or the genetic modification of sperm, eggs, or embryos—such work is permissible with private funding. However, researchers would need FDA approval for a clinical trial.

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Bioethicist Hank Greely of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, agrees the language was “bad policy.” He adds, “This is a good change, but it raises new challenges, for Congress and for society.”

Dropping the provision frees FDA to consider allowing a less controversial approach that combines genetic material from a mother, a father, and an egg donor to prevent an embryo from inheriting a mother’s mitochondrial disease, Greely notes. That “three-parent embryo” treatment is being tested in clinical trials in the United Kingdom and has been endorsed by U.S. experts. “It is much farther along … and U.S. clinical trials should not be under a blanket ban,” Greely says.