If you’re hoping to engineer perfect babies, you’re going to have to wait. An international panel of scientists---killjoys, these guys---has officially said the genome-editing technology Crispr needs more research into its safety...and that engineering human babies would probably be pretty bad anyway.
The rules, handed down at the culmination of a three-day Human Gene Editing Summit at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC probably won’t mean big changes. The US government will continue its prohibition on funding for gene-editing research in human embryos. The Chinese government will allow it to continue. Other nations will continue to debate how far to allow their scientists to go.
At the conference, many speakers expressed ethical concerns about messing with the human genome to enhance or “improve” genetic traits. And, predictably, others said genome edits should be an option for couples to prevent inherited diseases like Huntington’s or Tay-Sachs.
Either way, regulations are probably coming. “For making babies, you still need an IVF clinic,” says Hank Greely, a lawyer who works on bioscience issues at Stanford University. “It is not easy to hide, it’s already licensed and regulated. If the goal was to prohibit human germline editing, countries have the tools to be able to do that. If the goal were to allow it for some purposes, that shouldn’t be difficult to do.”
For now, though, the field is a bit feral. In April, a Chinese team reported in April that it had successfully modified the genome of human embryos using Crispr. The embryos were non-viable and the experiment---an attempt to eliminate a rare blood disease---failed, but such work would still be prohibited in the US. “We believe that we need to continue to push the frontiers of science,” says Jinghua Cao, deputy director general for international cooperation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The technology “is so complicated, there are lot of consequences yet to be discovered to make sure whether we can use it safely.”
Plus, Cao says, private reproductive labs are regulated as tightly as academic and government ones. “That’s also a thing we worry about,” Cao says. “We believe we need to regulate the private sector because the private sector learns fast. But I really don’t think we should stop it.”
The ongoing debate has precedent. In the early 2000s, a debate over human embryonic stem cells led then-president George W. Bush to halt the creation of new cell lines for research. That decision arguably hamstrung development in the field.
With both gene-editing and stem cells “there are high stakes in terms of the social issues involved,” says Charis Thompson, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who wrote about genome-editing ethics in a recent issue of Nature. “These questions come up much less in gene editing because people are not giving their tissue to make tools that will create a lot of value. The questions here are focused on the risk and danger to future generations.”
The conversation is far from over. Another group of scientists, ethicists and legal experts are working on a year-long review of gene-editing for the Academy. Their report is supposed to contain more concrete recommendations. And of course research into actually using Crispr will keep moving forward.
