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April 16 - April 24, 2022
In the end, they decided to call for a temporary halt on germline editing in humans, at least until the safety and social issues could be further understood.
“The technology is not ready for clinical application in the human germline,” she replied when a reporter for NPR asked her about the Chinese experiments.
Steven Pinker.
“The primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Boston Globe. “Get out of the way.” He took a brutal swipe at the entire profession of bioethicists.
The December 2015 International Summit
discussions do not always lead to broad societal consensuses.
list of criteria that should be met before germline editing should be allowed, among them: “absence of reasonable alternatives, restriction to preventing a serious disease or condition,”
“So long as heritable genome editing interventions are consistent with the welfare of the future person and with social justice and solidarity, they do not contravene any categorical moral prohibition.”
Congress passed a provision barring the Food and Drug Administration from reviewing any treatment “in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.”
Vladimir Putin
soldier, a person who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain.”
What struck Doudna and others at the meeting was that Jiankui did not seem interested in the moral issues involved with making inheritable gene edits to embryos.14
In this July 2017 talk at Cold Spring Harbor,
What he did not say was that he had already made plans to edit the gene in viable human embryos with the intent of giving birth to genetically altered babies—in
he injected the fertilized eggs with CRISPR-Cas9 that targeted the CCR5 gene.
Jiankui began hinting at his plans to a few of the American researchers he met, many of whom later expressed regret that they did not try harder to stop him or blow the whistle. Most notably, he confided in William Hurlbut,
Jiankui insisted that only “a fringe group” opposed making germline edits.
half-hour lecture by Porteus about all the reasons he thought Jiankui’s idea was terrible.
The most involved and tainted of Jiankui’s American enablers was Michael Deem, his PhD advisor at Rice.
Kiran Musunuru of the University of Pennsylvania later commented, “The first attempt to hack the code of life and, ostensibly, improve the health of human babies had in fact been a hack job.”
One reason it would be hard to prevent future CRISPR babies, Zayner later explained in an essay for Stat, was that the technology would soon be within the reach of accomplished misfits.
even supports using CRISPR to make enhancements
think it’s okay to choose the genes you want for your children.
“Sure, I would make my kids six inches taller and more athletic if I could,” he says. “And more attractive. People who are taller and more attractive are more successful, right? What would you want for your child? Obviously for my kids, I would want the world for them.”
“Andy was very cavalier, which makes me wonder whether future generations will see this as such a big deal,” she says. “Maybe they’ll see it like IVF,
The senators were more interested in trying to understand the value CRISPR might have in medicine and agriculture.
Huntington’s and Tay-Sachs,”
“The national academies group is focusing on science,” Hamburg said. “The WHO is looking at how to create a global regulatory framework.”
The conditions that had been specified for permissible embryo gene editing—that it be safe and “medically necessary”—could not be met for the time being. But some argued that Jiankui’s actions showed the need for a clearer and brighter stoplight.
Among them were Lander, his protégé Feng Zhang, Paul Berg, Francis Collins, and Doudna’s scientific collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier.
the m-...
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moratorium
“We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing—that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm, eggs or embryos) to make genetically modified children,” the article began.
Lander emphasized that the issue should not be left to individual choice and the free market.
Zhang made the point that the issues surrounding gene editing needed to be settled by society as a whole and not by individuals. “You can imagine a situation where parents will feel pressure to edit their children because other parents are,” he said. “It could further exacerbate inequality. It could create a total mess in society.”
He suspected that Lander might be pushing the moratorium to curry favor with Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, which provides a lot of funding for academic labs.
Doudna,
put out a call for a moratorium at this stage is just unrealistic,”
scientists don’t play God, who will? —James Watson, to Britain’s Parliamentary
And it will someday offer both the promise and the peril of allowing us, or some of us, to boost our bodies and enhance our babies
Does empathy depend on believing that but for the grace of God, or the randomness of the natural lottery, we could have been born with a different set of endowments?
Will an emphasis on personal liberty turn the most fundamental aspects of human nature into consumer choices made at a genetic supermarket?
The primary concern is germline editing, those changes that are done in the DNA of human eggs or sperm or early-stage embryos so that every cell in the resulting children—and all of their descendants—will carry the edited trait.
somatic editing,
Somatic editing
may not be permanent.
In the U.S., a prenatal diagnosis of Down’s syndrome results in an abortion approximately two-thirds of the time.
For example, James Watson, the outspoken co-discoverer of DNA, once opined that a woman should have the right to abort a fetus based on any preference or prejudice, including not wanting a child that would be short or dyslexic or gay or female.
even slightly blurry lines can be definitive.
Crossing the germline takes us to a distinct new realm. It involves engineering a genome rather than nurturing one that was produced naturally,
