One of the wonderful oddities of the Epic of Gilgamesh is that our Mesopotamian hero is described as being two-thirds divine and one-third human. That's a breakdown you don't see every day. Hercules and other Greek demigods were generally described as having a mathematically comprehensible 50-50 split between human and divine parents. One possible explanation for the 2/3-1/3 reckoning is that the ancient author was counting divine parentage as twice as important as human, so a being who had one human and one divine parent would be counted as only one third human. This is never stated explicitly, however, leaving Gilgamesh fans across the centuries to speculate as to exactly how he came by a parentage divisible by three.

I don't think anything like this was involved, however:

British scientists say they have created human embryos containing DNA from two women and a man in a procedure that researchers hope might be used one day to produce embryos free of inherited diseases.

Though the preliminary research has raised concerns about the possibility of genetically modified babies, the scientists say that the embryos are still only primarily the product of one man and one woman.

"We are not trying to alter genes, we're just trying to swap a small proportion of the bad ones for some good ones," said Patrick Chinnery, a professor of neurogenetics at Newcastle University involved in the research.

These researchers are being careful to produce an embryo that is essentially the offspring of just two parents -- with genetic material from the third "parent" being brought in just to address a specific problem. But the implications are unavoidable -- a human embryo could be produced with three or five or nine or 100 parents. I'm not sure what all the arguments against such a procedure would be, but one that comes to mind is that life is complicated enough without being brought in the world and being told that you are the child of some large number of people. And what would the legal obligations of the various parents be? Would they be divided up depending on the amount of genetic material contributed?

On the other hand -- critical and possibly unanswerable social issues aside -- wouldn't such children stand to be particularly robust? One of the advantages of sexual reproduction is that greater variety leads to greater viability. Multiple parents could give offspring genetic variety on steroids. Still, I think their must be some risks associated with mixing it up genetically, and those would be magnified, too.

Via GeekPress.