WASHINGTON — An elite panel of scientists and bioethicists offered guarded approval Wednesday of a form of genetic engineering that could prevent congenital diseases but would result in babies with genetic material from three parents.

The committee, which was convened last year at the request of the Food and Drug Administration, concluded that it is ethically permissible to ‘‘go forward, but with caution’’ with mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT), said chairman Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University.

The new clinical procedures should be used rarely, with extreme care and with abundant government oversight, and they initially should be applied only to male embryos, the panel said. The group delivered its report at a news conference at the National Academy of Sciences headquarters in Washington.

The findings come at a time of dazzling advances in genetic engineering and a commensurate struggle to understand the ethics of ‘‘playing God,’’ a phrase invoked twice Wednesday by committee member R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin.

Certain serious congenital diseases can be passed from a mother to child via the tiny amount of genetic material contained in the mitochondria, which are small organs within a cell that are often described as the cell’s energy factories or power plants.

New experimental techniques involving in vitro fertilization make it possible to replace mutated and potentially disease-associated mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) with nonpathogenic mtDNA donated from another woman.