A 15-year-old Chinese girl suffering from thalassemia is recovering after a transplant from her newborn brother, conceived specifically to provide matching umbilical cord blood for treatment.

A 15-year-old Chinese girl who has been suffering from a severe blood disorder most of her life is slowly recovering after receiving a transplant from her newborn brother. Xiaoyan from southern China’s Guangdong province is now only 140cm tall, and weighs just 25kg. She was diagnosed with thalassemia, an inherited blood disorder, at three months old. Her father, a construction worker, and her jobless mother did not arrange standard treatment for her except for regular blood transfusions. It was....