Nobel laureate David Baltimore of CalTech speaks to reporters at the National Academy of Sciences worldwide summit on the safety and ethics of human gene editing, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015, in Washington.
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A hot new tool to edit the human genetic code has a big wow factor: the promise of long-sought cures for intractable diseases.
Ahead of the International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, DC, around 150 scientists, health practitioners, scholars, and others led by the Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) have grouped together to call for a ban of heritable human genetic modification that could lead to “genetically modified humans” or “designer babies”.
Jennifer Doudna from the University of California, Berkeley stressed that forbidding gene editing study could obstruct the scientific community from landing vital discoveries. Her calls for debate on its implications and boundaries led to this week’s gathering, a step that could eventually lead to research recommendations.
While CRISPR is highly effective and relatively simple to use, one major shortcoming is that it can cut additional sites on the genome that are not targeted, potentially causing undesired genetic effects.
Scientists are engineering animals with humanlike disorders to unravel the gene defects that fuel them. Researchers have applauded proposals to use CRISPR to treat diseases such as HIV, sickle cell anemia, and cancer, by editing the DNA inside of somatic cells in the blood. The experiment failed, but forced the scientific community to realize that human intelligence and technology have finally reached the point where they could change our genetic fate. They are even hatching mutant mosquitoes created to be incapable of spreading malaria, and exploring ways to wipe out invasive species.
One hurdle is safety. That’s mostly due to a new technology called CRISPR-an easy, cheap, and very precise way to “edit” the DNA of living cells.
Now researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT believe they have found a way round the problem by tweaking three amino acids to reduce off-target editing cuts.
As for that preliminary embryo research, it is nowhere near ready for real-world use, but there is controversy over whether and how to continue such experiments to see if it eventually will work. And just as fraudulent stem cell clinics already lure desperate patients, there’s worry about misuse of gene-editing techniques before they’re proven. Laws and guidelines in other countries vary widely.
Still, Mathews is optimistic that the summit will allow researchers to identify issues where there is some agreement, which could help guide new policies and regulations.
Hille Haker, chair of Catholic Moral Theology at Loyola University Chicago, argued on Tuesday in favour of a two-year worldwide ban on research that involves changing human reproductive cells, also known as germline cells. Getting to a high level of precision has been tricky to date, but researchers have made great strides in just the few years since the idea of using the enzyme for gene editing emerged from laboratories in MA and California. While the technology can be used to permanently delete mutations resulting in inherited diseases, the critics of the technique argue that it could also damage healthy strands of DNA.
“The medical arguments are tenuous and the possible social consequences are grave”, said Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society advocacy group.
Allowing gene editing for medical reasons would open the door to designer babies with cosmetic changes, too, she added.
According to these people, new developments in genetic engineering and synthetic biology could result in irrevocable altering of human that would have massive effects on humankind in future.
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“Is it more ethical to edit embryos, or to screen a lot of embryos and throw them away?”
