Should We Genetically Modify Our Children?
By Jessica Cussins,
Kennedy School Review
| 12. 07. 2015
Now that we have the power to permanently alter humanity, should we?
This was the question at the heart of the International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, D.C., last week, an event co-hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.’s Royal Society. For three days, hundreds of scientists, scholars, and public interest advocates (and thousands others online and at #GeneEditSummit) discussed the scientific, social, ethical, and legal considerations posed by the prospect of making alterations to the human genetic code.
The summit was set in motion with the advent of a new gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. The technique was discovered just three years ago, more than a decade after other gene-editing technologies. Unlike previous methods, CRISPR is cheap and easy to use, and caused an explosion in research and interest. The U.S. National Institute of Health invested more than $80 million in CRISPR in 2014, and nearly 600 papers about the new technique were published by the end of that year.
All of the potential...
Related Articles
By Fyodor Urnov, Time | 08.12.2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides...
By Joy Zhang, Progress Educational Trust | 08.12.2024
What do China's new ethical guidlines tell us about the country's changing attitude to human genome editing? Professor Joy Zhang reads between the lines...
Recently, China's National Science and Technology Ethics Committee introduced a new set of ethics guidelines on...
By Priyanka Runwal, Chemical and Engineering News | 08.05.2024
Saritee Sanodiya, 26, has spent countless days wondering if she’ll ever live a “normal” life. Growing up, Sanodiya often missed school, frequenting the hospital for sudden, life-threatening drops in her hemoglobin levels and excruciating pain in her joints. High fever...
It’s been a busy couple of months in biopolitics, with developments in the US, UK, China, Japan, and implicitly on Mars. Time for a brief roundup.
• • •
Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...