Scientists call for caution in gene editing

As researchers at Harvard and M.I.T brought up a new way to improve the precision of CRISPR’s DNA-snipping, Feng Zhang, one of the study’s authors, said there are a lot more systems that might prove to be even more powerful, and that scientists could be able to take the human editing technology to the next level. She’s calling for a global pause on the practice of germline engineering.

Many scientific organisations have called for a time-out on any experiments on human cells, fearing that this crosses into dicey ethical territory. “However, as scientific knowledge advances and societal views evolve, the clinical use of germline editing should be revisited on a regular basis”, the group said. Law and bioethics professor Pilar Ossorio from University of Wisconsin-Madison said that of the various kinds of risks, the “major” one that gets people concerned are “off-target” consequences. Experts have gathered in Washington to discuss how the revolutionary technology could be used ethically.

Top geneticists are now meeting at the International Summit on Human Gene Editing to have an agreement on when, how, and for what purposes gene editing should be used in humans.

In the meantime, critics argued that the experiment would pave way to “designer babies” and a new era of eugenics, where the individual with the best genes survives and dominates the genetically inferior.

In a statement obtained by The Washington Post, the International Summit on Human Gene Editing said, “The safety issues have not yet been adequately explored”.

CRISPR/Cas9 is now being tested experimentally in a multitude of ways in academic and biotech labs: to modify pig DNA to produce organs for human transplants, to alter mosquito DNA so that the insect destroys malaria, and to remove a rare blood disorder gene from nonviable human embryos.

So far, 80 HIV patients have received the therapy in first-stage testing – with good results, said Sangamo senior scientist Fyodor Urnov.

The most controversial item on the agenda was genetic editing of human embryos and germ cells.

CRISPR/Cas9 technology can precisely target DNA and modify it. It has rapidly developed in the last few years and researchers are keen to see how it can be used in humans in the future.

“The altered version of Cas9 seems to be a safer tool, which would be useful if scientists want to correct defects in human genes”. “We are close to altering human heredity and we need to decide how we as a society are going to use this capability”.

With both gene-editing and stem cells “there are high stakes in terms of the social issues involved”, says Charis Thompson, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who wrote about genome-editing ethics in a recent issue of Nature.

Then there’s the query of what’s permissible to change: Just deleting a gene that causes a devastating illness in a family?

This unique technology can now allow scientists to edit human DNA with the help of biological “scissors” which works via a similar word processing program that can detect and replace defective ones.

The researcher noted that as safety concerns fade out, the ethical concern become more clear.

“I can understand why they did that but I disagree”, she said.