Charlie Gard would have turned one year old last week.
Two days before the British infant died of a
mitochondrial disease on July 28, a short article in
MIT Technology Review
teased that Shoukhrat Mtalipov and his team at Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues had used CRISPR-Cas9 to replace a mutation in human embryos, a titillating heads-up that didn�t actually name the gene or disease.
A week later,
Nature
published details of what the researchers call gene correction, not editing, because it uses natural DNA repair. I covered the news conference, with a bit of perspective, for
Genetic Literacy Project
and
Medscape Medical News
.
Might gene editing enable Charlie�s parents, who might themselves develop mild symptoms as they age, to have another child free of the family�s disease? Could anything have saved the baby?
Published on August 04, 2017 21:00