World Health Organization advisers urge global effort to regulate genome editing
By Megan Molteni,
STAT [cites CGS]
| 07. 12. 2021
On Monday, a World Health Organization advisory committee called on the world’s largest public health authority to stand by the 2019 statement of its director-general urging a halt to any experiments that might lead to the births of more gene-edited humans.
The committee — established in December 2018, weeks after news broke of the birth of twin girls whose genomes were edited by Chinese scientist He Jiankui — said in a pair of long-awaited reports that the germline editing technology that led to the “CRISPR babies” scandal is still too scientifically and ethically fraught for use. But for other, less controversial forms of gene-editing, the reports offer a path to how governments might establish the technology as a tool for improving public health.
“The framework recognizes that policies governing the technology will likely vary from country to country,” committee co-chair and former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret Hamburg said at a virtual press conference Monday. “Nonetheless the framework calls on all countries to incorporate key values and principles into their policies, such as inclusiveness, equal moral worth, social...
Related Articles
Gray wolf by Jessica Eirich via Unsplash
“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25
Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one...
By Katrina Northrop, The Washington Post | 04.06.2025
photo via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 3.0
China's most infamous scientist is attempting a comeback. He Jiankui, who went to jail for three years after claiming he had created the world's first genetically altered babies, says he remains...
By Kevin Davies, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 03.27.2025
Around 2018–19, there was not a bigger science and ethical story than the debate over heritable human genome editing (HHGE) and the scandal over the “CRISPR babies.” The scientist, He Jiankui, who attempted to engineer the germline of human embryos...
By Megan Molteni, Stat | 03.28.2025
WASHINGTON — Keith Joung knows better than a lot of people what, exactly, it might require to prove to regulators and patients that CRISPR could be safely used to alter the genome of a human embryo. If, of course, society...