No One Should Edit The Genes Of Embryos To Make Babies, NIH Chief Says
By Nidhi Subbaraman,
BuzzFeed
| 07. 14. 2016
[originally published as "At Gene Editing Meeting, Scientists Discuss God, Racism, Designer Babies"]
Gene editing must never be used to create “designer babies” with enhanced abilities, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told a gathering of top scientists on Tuesday.
More provocatively, he also said that science is not ready for the controversial new technology to be used to eliminate genetic diseases that are passed down from one generation to the next.
“We must be aware of the hubris that it would take for human beings to be so smart that we thought we had the ability and the ethical principles to do such a thing,” the NIH chief, Francis Collins, said. “Humility would be a very good principle to attach to any such discussion.”
Collins was addressing a prestigious committee of about two dozen legal and scientific experts gathered to discuss the ethics of gene editing — a new technology that grabbed the spotlight last year.
CRISPR/Cas9, the most famous of this suite of powerful new tools, enables scientists to locate and replace human genes with unprecedented ease and precision.
But the prospect of using the tool on egg...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...
