The Wrong Way to Make Policy About Heritable Genome Modification
By Marcy Darnovsky,
The Hill
| 05. 29. 2019
Last fall, when a Chinese scientist announced that he had created genetically modified twin babies, the world was stunned and outraged. In the U.S., we were able to draw some modicum of reassurance from a policy that has served as a barrier to such reckless human experimentation: A rider to the federal spending bill bars the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from considering clinical trials “in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.”
Yet now that provision is being eyed for removal.
When it was adopted in 2015, the provision brought the U.S. into closer alignment with most other countries across the globe with developed biotech sectors. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, dozens of national legislatures debated whether new genetic technologies should be used to alter the biology and traits of future human beings.
Every one of them decided that the benefits would be dubious at best and the societal dangers unacceptably dire, and passed laws against it. In Europe, 29 countries also signed and ratified the...
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...