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From designer babies to engineered mosquitoes, advances in genome-editing technologies such as CRISPR–Cas9 have raised the possibility of tremendous scientific advances — and serious ethical concerns.
In a preliminary 130-page report released on 30 September, the influential Nuffield Council on Bioethics in London announced that two applications of the technology demanded further attention: genome editing in human embryos and in livestock.
The two areas were selected on the basis of months of analysis and input from scholars and the public, said Hugh Whittall, director of the Nuffield Council, at a briefing on 29 September.
It will probably be years before genome editing is used in human reproduction, but it was clear from that input that ethical concerns about edited human embryos were at the forefront of many minds, says Karen Yeung, Nuffield working-group member and a legal scholar at King’s College London. “Human reproductive applications are perhaps the most talked about or controversial area.”
Designer-baby fears
Although gene editing was already racing through research laboratories, the revelation in 2015 that researchers had used CRISPR–Cas9 in human embryos shone a...