Can gene editing kill deadly diseases?
By Colin Baker,
Al Jazeera
| 04. 11. 2023
“This keeps us all awake at night. Once you have edited someone, you cannot unedit them.” Fyodor Urnov, Innovative Genomics Institute, Berkeley, California
Two clinics sit adjacent to one another in a new hospital in a medium-sized city in the developed world.
In one, a family waits for a long-scheduled appointment. Their daughter suffers from a rare inherited disease. One of her genes encodes for a protein that doesn’t perform its functions normally, and her degenerative ailment is most likely fatal. Their doctor is about to discuss a procedure that will remove cells from the affected organ, correct the inherited faults and reinfuse her cells, allowing her organ to perform its functions without the inborn errors that she and her family have been managing since her birth.
The procedure is expensive, requiring a payment plan over a decade financed by a start-up, and it will need chemotherapy and a hospital stay. But it’s a one-time fix, and if side-effects appear down the line, doctors will study them.
In another waiting room, a soon-to-be-expectant couple waits to meet a geneticist. The doctor will present a plan for their unborn baby: to alter a few lines of its DNA to reverse a rare disorder before...
Related Articles
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
By Jessica Mouzo, El País | 10.03.2025
DNA is the molecule of life: this double-helix structure, present in every cell in the body and organized into fragments called genes, stores the instructions for making organisms function. It is a highly precise biological machine, but sometimes it breaks...
GeneWatch UK has prepared a briefing on the genetic modification of nature for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Congress in October 2025
The upcoming Congress claims to be “where the world comes together to set priorities and drive conservation and sustainable development action.” A major concern for those on the outside is that the Congress may advance plans to develop and encourage the use of synthetic biology in nature conservation. This could at first glance sound like...