WHO panel proposes new global registry for all CRISPR human experiments
By Jon Cohen,
Science
| 03. 19. 2019
There’s an “urgent need” to create a transparent global registry that would list all experiments related to human genome editing, an expert committee convened to advise the World Health Organization (WHO) said today. The international committee of 18 researchers and bioethicists, which met in Geneva, Switzerland, over the past 2 days, also agreed with the widespread consensus that it would be “irresponsible at this time for anyone to proceed with clinical applications of human germline genome editing.”
The committee stopped short, however, of endorsing the call for a “moratorium” on human germline editing issued last week by prominent group of researchers in a Nature commentary. “I don’t think a vague moratorium is the answer to what needs to be done,” said Margaret Hamburg, a co-chair of the WHO committee who formerly headed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and now works with the U.S. National Academy of Medicine in Washington, D.C., during a teleconference for the media today. Several other high-profile statements and reports on genome editing have also avoided using the word “moratorium,” although they have similarly emphasized...
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 Azeen Ghorayshi and Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 08.12.2024
An emerging movement against in vitro fertilization is driving some doctors and patients in red states to move or destroy frozen embryos.
The embryo migration is most striking in Alabama, where the State Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos...
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 06.27.2024
Image by Robina Weermeijer from Unsplash
A molecular-editing tool that’s small enough to be delivered to the brain shuts down the production of proteins that cause prion diseases, a rare but deadly group of neurodegenerative disorders.
The system — known...
By Staff, AP-NORC | 07.12.2024
Image by Dr. Jayesh Amin from Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by-SA 3.0
Most adults support protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, a type of fertility treatment where eggs are combined with sperm outside the body in a...