During the 1990s, James Grifo, a physician and researcher at New York University, had been working to develop a technique to help treat certain kinds of infertility. Although in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments had been successful for many of his patients, IVF could not help women whose eggs were genetically sound and could be fertilized, but were not viable enough to grow into a healthy embryo. In such cases, Grifo imagined it might be possible to remove the nucleus from a donor egg from a healthy woman, replace it with the gene-carrying nucleus taken from the patients egg, and then implant the reconstructed egg into the patients uterus where it would continue to develop. Because the implanted egg would retain the mother's DNA, she would give birth to a biologically related child.
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