New Genetic Engineering – Small Cause, Big Effect
By Benedikt Haerlin,
ARC2020
| 07. 07. 2023
Adding, removing or swapping individual base pairs in the genome can make a huge difference to the functioning of a cell and the properties of an entire organism. It’s a bit like Johann Sebastian Bach’s definition of skilful piano playing: you just have to press the right key at the right time. It’s that simple, and yet also that difficult. Therein lies the appeal of genetic engineering, but also its risk.
The European Commission is now proposing that plants that have been genetically modified at up to twenty different sites of the genome should nevertheless be “considered equivalent to conventional plants”. At these twenty sites, any number of base pairs (nucleotides) may be deleted or inverted, up to 20 base pairs may be completely altered or replaced, any length of contigous DNA sequences may be replaced by related sequences, and any other alteration of any kind may be made that already occurs in any plant that can be crossed directly with the genetically modified plant or via intermediate steps.
No individual risk assessment and approval would be required for those...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024
Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash
When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy trial for “bubble baby” syndrome it was hailed as a medical breakthrough. The treatment had a more than 95% success...
By Victoria Bisset and Adela Suliman, The Washington Post | 05.09.2024
Photo by CDC from Unsplash
A baby girl born with profound genetic deafness can now hear unaided after receiving a “groundbreaking” gene therapy trial, Britain’s National Health Service said Thursday.
Opal Sandy, an 18-month-old from Oxfordshire, England, is the first...
By Carrie Arnold, Nature Biotechnology | 04.17.2024
Tome Biosciences came out of stealth mode on 12 December with a haul of over $200 million to develop the company’s gene editing platform. Tome’s first order of business was to snap up Replace Therapeutics to expand its toolkit to...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.24.2024
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she...