A federal judge in San Antonio ruled Wednesday that Texas' ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutionally deprives some citizens of due process and equal protection under the law by stigmatizing their relationships and treating them differently from opposite-sex couples.

U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia cited recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings as having trumped Texas' moves to ban gay marriage.

"Today's court decision is not made in defiance of the great people of Texas or the Texas Legislature, but in compliance with the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedent," he said in his order. "Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose, state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our U.S. Constitution."

But Garcia's ruling, while a major victory for groups seeking to make marriage legal for gay and lesbian couples nationwide, will not win them Texas marriage licenses anytime soon.

Although Garcia issued a preliminary injunction against the state's enforcing its 2003 law and 2005 constitutional amendment that limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, he stayed it from taking effect until his ruling can be reviewed on appeal.

The provocative notion of genetically modified babies met the very real world of federal regulation Tuesday, as a government advisory committee began debating a new technique that combines DNA from three people to create embryos free of certain inherited diseases.

The two-day meeting of the Food and Drug Administration panel is focused on a procedure that scientists think could help women who carry DNA mutations for conditions such as blindness and epilepsy. The process would let them have children without passing on those defects.

The debate over whether the technique -- nicknamed "three-parent IVF" -- should be allowed to proceed to human tests underscores how quickly the science of reproductive medicine is evolving. Scientists argue that this technology, like cloning and embryonic stem cell research, has huge potential to help people. But it is also highly sensitive, touching ethical and political nerves.

The technology involves taking defective mitochondria, the cell's powerhouses, from a mother's egg and replacing them with healthy mitochondria from another woman. After being fertilized by the father's sperm in a lab, the egg would be implanted in the mother, and the pregnancy could progress normally.

The procedure was pioneered by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, a researcher at Oregon Health and Science University who focuses on early embryo development and stem cell biology. He has been able to produce five healthy monkeys using this technique and has proposed testing it in humans.

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