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Should Scientists Toy With the Secret to Life?

January 29, 2019

The gene-editing technology Crispr has the power to remake life as we know it. Questions about how to use it concern everyone

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Gene Drive Technology Makes Mouse Offspring Inherit Specific Traits from Parents

January 24, 2019

Kim Cooper and Hannah Grunwald write, “As mouse geneticists, we spend a lot of time waiting for mice to make more mice.”

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Gene Drive Technology Makes Mouse Offspring Inherit Specific Traits from Parents

Thursday, January 24th, 2019

As mouse geneticists, we spend a lot of time waiting for mice to make more mice. Their small size, ease of care and willingness to mate have made mice the “mammal of choice” for scientists for more than a century. Indeed, these wriggly fur balls that strike fear in the hearts of some are owed a debt of gratitude for all they’ve taught researchers about human health and how mammalian bodies are built and function.

In our lab we use mice to understand how limbs evolved. In particular, we’re fascinated by the genetic changes made over tens of millions of years since the first four-legged animal flopped out of water and onto land. It is remarkable that the dolphin’s fin and the bat’s wing, for example, are derived from a common ancestor. Our aim is to discover which of the differences in their DNA caused dramatic changes in the shapes of different mammals. Specifically, we work with a small, desert-dwelling rodent called the jerboa, which has almost absurdly long hind limbs. One very powerful strategy to understand the jerboa’s enormous feet would be to engineer a mouse with jerboa limb development genes and see if those genetic changes make a mouse with longer legs.

But if we want to understand the complicated genetic history of the evolution of the jerboa limb, we need to study several genes at once. This causes a problem similar to that of biomedical researchers working with mice to understand human genetic diseases. Although mice and humans are similar in many ways and are vulnerable to some of the same genetic diseases, our most common diseases are caused by more than one gene.

…continue reading ‘Gene Drive Technology Makes Mouse Offspring Inherit Specific Traits from Parents’

Image: By Pogrebnoj-Alexandroff – open free cources, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44440744

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The Conversation

Scientists Disagree About the Ethics and Governance of Human Germline Editing

January 18, 2019

Despite the appearance of agreement, scientists are not of the same mind about the ethics and governance of human germline editing. A careful review of public comments and published commentaries in top-tier science journals reveals marked differences in perspective

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Scientists Disagree About the Ethics and Governance of Human Germline Editing

Friday, January 18th, 2019

The current chapter in the debate about the societal and political implications of human germline editing took off nearly four years ago, in response to a laboratory experiment in which researchers in China used CRISPR technology on nonviable human embryos. In March 2015, an article titled “Don’t Edit the Human Germline,” coauthored by scientists and others working on somatic cell genome editing and associated with the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, appeared in the “Comment” section of Nature. A week later, Science published a “Perspective” commentary coauthored by another group, most of them scientists convened by CRISPR codiscoverer Jennifer Doudna, under the title “A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline genetic modification.”

The first article described the “tenuous” therapeutic benefit, and the likely serious risks (including risks to future generations), of germline editing. The authors concluded that this technology was “dangerous and ethically unacceptable,” in part because “permitting even unambiguously therapeutic interventions could start us down a path towards non-therapeutic genetic enhancement.” They further suggested that “a voluntary moratorium in the scientific community could be an effective way to discourage human germline modification.”

In contrast, the second article stressed “the promise of curing genetic disease.” While it concluded that “there was an urgent need for open discussion of the merits and risks of human genome modification by a broad cohort of scientists, clinicians, social scientists, the general public, and relevant public entities and interest groups,” it asserted that the goal of such discussion would be to “enable pathways to responsible uses of this technology, if any, to be identified.” The authors recognized that it would be premature to move forward with human germline genome editing, but studiously avoided any use of the term moratorium.

…continue reading ‘Scientists Disagree About the Ethics and Governance of Human Germline Editing’

Image: By National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) from Bethesda, MD, USA – CRISPR-Cas9 Editing of the Genome, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52360100

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Hastings Center

Groundbreaking Deal Makes Large Number of German Studies Free to Public

January 16, 2019

In exchange for an annual lump sum, German libraries, universities, and research institutes completed a nationwide agreement with the three largest scientific publishers making papers by German authors free to read around the world, while giving researchers in Germany access to all of the publishers’ online content

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