CRISPR Germline Editing Reverberates Through Biotech Community

The organizers of a recent meeting in Napa, California, to consider the broad societal implications of clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) genome editing have succeeded in their primary goal of stimulating public debate on the ethical issues raised by the technology. Although the event, held on January 24, took place behind closed doors, a subsequent commentary from its leading participants—plus two influential non-attendees, George Church of Harvard Medical School in Boston, and Martin Jinek of the University of Zurich—prompted widespread media coverage (Science 348, 36–38, 2015). The group has called for a broadly based discussion of the potential merits and risks of the technology and a global moratorium on germline applications, until such time, if ever, responsible uses can be identified.

But the declaration, along with a high-profile commentary in The Wall Street Journal on April 9 from David Baltimore and Paul Berg, two veterans of the 1970s debates on genetic engineering, has already altered the social context in which new developments in the field will be received. Any scientist or organization that crosses...