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This Editorial Is Not About Designer Babies

April 15, 2019

A procedure called mitochondrial replacement therapy could eliminate devastating diseases. It would not enable parents to ‘design’ their children

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‘Three-Person’ Baby Boy Born in Greece

April 11, 2019

The experimental form of IVF uses an egg from the mother, sperm from the father, and another egg from a donor woman. It was developed to help families affected by deadly mitochondrial diseases which are passed down from mother to baby. It has been tried in only one prior case – a family from Jordan

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Woman in First Legal Challenge Against UK’s 10-Year Limit on Egg-Freezing

March 18, 2019

Fertility laws compel clinics to destroy frozen eggs after a decade, irrespective of a woman’s age

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Chinese Government Funding May Have Been Used for ‘CRISPR Babies’ Project, Documents Suggest

February 25, 2019

Three government institutions in China, including the nation’s science ministry, may have funded the “CRISPR babies” study that led to the birth last November of two genetically modified twin girls, according to documents reviewed by STAT

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Embryo ‘Adoption’ Is Growing, but It’s Getting Tangled in the Abortion Debate

February 18, 2019

“The issue in the medical community is that by calling it ‘adoption,’ we give too much personhood to the embryo,” said Kimberly Tyson, the marketing and program director at Snowflake Embryo Adoption in Loveland, Colo

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A Third MRT Baby Is On Its Way

January 23, 2019

It has been recently reported that a 32 year old Greek woman is 27 weeks pregnant with a child who was conceived after a mitochondrial replacement technique (MRT) – in this case Maternal Spindle Transfer (MST). If true, this would be just the third birth following a reproductive technique that mixes the DNA of three people

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A Third MRT Baby Is On Its Way

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2019

Written by César Palacios-González

It has been recently reported (link in Spanish) that a 32 year old Greek woman is 27 weeks pregnant with a child who was conceived after a mitochondrial replacement technique (MRT) – in this case Maternal Spindle Transfer (MST). If true this is really big news in terms of reproductive medicine and biotechnology, we are still waiting for data to be published. If successful, this would be just the third birth following a reproductive technique that mixes the DNA of three people (you will probably remember the big media buzz a couple of years ago about ‘three parent babies’). This newest feat was achieved by a group of Spanish and Greek scientists; the clinical trial was carried out in Greece due to the fact that in Spain MRTs are not on the list of authorised reproductive techniques.

Before discussing what I consider to be the main ethical issue with this case, let us talk a bit about mitochondria and MRTs. Every human egg contains thousands upon thousands of mitochondrion. These tiny organelles have the really important task of producing the energy (in the form of ATP) that first the egg, then the developing embryo, and finally the human adult need to adequately function. It is thus not strange that when mitochondria do not work as they should the human body ‘malfunctions’. And it is also not strange that mitochondrial dysfunction more significantly affects the organs that require the most energy, for example the brain and the muscles.

To understand, broadly, what can go wrong with mitochondria, we need to bear in mind two of their characteristics: a) that they have their own DNA, and b) that they are mostly solely maternally transmitted. Regarding the former, inside every nucleated human cell there is nuclear DNA (nDNA) and there is mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)….

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Practical Ethics

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

The Future of Gene Editing — Toward Scientific and Social Consensus

January 17, 2019

On the day after Thanksgiving 2018, Jennifer Doudna, whose research on bacterial immune systems led to the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR, received a startling email from the Chinese scientist He Jiankui. “Babies born,” read the subject line. (with comments from our Jeffrey Kahn)

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The Future of Gene Editing — Toward Scientific and Social Consensus

Thursday, January 17th, 2019

On the day after Thanksgiving 2018, Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research on bacterial immune systems led to the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR (for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats),¹ received a startling email from the Chinese scientist He Jiankui. “Babies born,” read the subject line. Though Doudna was previously unaware that He had been working to create the world’s first “CRISPR babies,” she had long worried that CRISPR-related research was leaping ahead of the consensus necessary to support its ethical use. In her memoir about gene editing,² Doudna describes a nightmare in which she is summoned by a pig-faced Hitler to describe the potential implications of the “amazing technology” she developed. But it’s the preoccupation of Doudna’s waking life, “that through a series of reckless, poorly conceived experiments, scientists would prematurely implement CRISPR without proper oversight or consideration of the risks,” that has proven more prescient.

Indeed, as the details of He’s experiment emerged, it quickly became impossible to separate the implications of the science from the ethics violations that had enabled it. He apparently attempted to edit the CCR5 gene in the germlines of two embryos. CCR5 is thought to be the major receptor through which HIV gains access to T cells, and He aimed to confer lifetime resistance to HIV. The magnitude of negligence was staggering — from the absence of clinical need (there are safe and effective ways to prevent HIV), to the uncertainty of harms (the twins may be at heightened risk from infections such as West Nile virus and influenza, and other potential consequences of both on- and off-target effects remain unknown), to a misleading consent process (the experiment was described as an “AIDS vaccine development project”), to a total lack of transparency (the data have not yet been published).³

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NEJM

This Editorial Is Not About Designer Babies

This Editorial Is Not About Designer Babies

‘Three-Person’ Baby Boy Born in Greece

‘Three-Person’ Baby Boy Born in Greece

Woman in First Legal Challenge Against UK’s 10-Year Limit on Egg-Freezing

Woman in First Legal Challenge Against UK’s 10-Year Limit on Egg-Freezing

Chinese Government Funding May Have Been Used for ‘CRISPR Babies’ Project, Documents Suggest

Chinese Government Funding May Have Been Used for ‘CRISPR Babies’ Project, Documents Suggest

Embryo ‘Adoption’ Is Growing, but It’s Getting Tangled in the Abortion Debate

Embryo ‘Adoption’ Is Growing, but It’s Getting Tangled in the Abortion Debate

A Third MRT Baby Is On Its Way

A Third MRT Baby Is On Its Way

Scientists Disagree About the Ethics and Governance of Human Germline Editing

Scientists Disagree About the Ethics and Governance of Human Germline Editing

The Future of Gene Editing — Toward Scientific and Social Consensus

The Future of Gene Editing — Toward Scientific and Social Consensus

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