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A group of leading academic scientists met early this spring at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to consider what technical obstacles need to be overcome before trying germline gene therapy experiments in humans. The participants agree that researchers probably will not be ready for the first clinical trials for at least one to two decades. However, they anticipate rapid technical progress and expect it to help in overcoming current rules in the United States and elsewhere reflecting widely held political and ethical beliefs that deliberate genetic engineering of the human germline should not be attempted.
The research topic on which the day-long UCLA symposium, "Engineering the Human Germline," focused is "not distant anymore, so we need to begin to explore the issue, deepen the dialogue, and make it acceptable," says symposium organizer Gregory Stock, who is director of the UCLA program on science, technology, and society.
Stock and symposium coorganizer John Campbell, a neuroscientist at the UCLA School of Medicine, argue that progress along several fronts such as building human artificial chromosomes...