Designer Babies Are Here. What's the Next Edit?
By Emily Mullin,
Neo.Life/Medium
| 11. 29. 2018
A Chinese scientist engineered kids to resist HIV. Here are other changes that could be on the feature list for Humanity 2.0.
Jiankui He stunned the world this week when a report revealed he had edited genes in human embryos aiming to make people resistant to HIV infection. So far, two children, twin girls named Lulu and Nana, are said to have been born with altered genomes.
The Chinese scientist’s work crossed a line that many have feared and some have dreamed of: the creation of designer babies engineered for certain enhancements.
Editing genes in embryos is hugely controversial because the changes can be passed along to future generations. You can imagine, for instance, using gene editing to wipe out a genetic disease in an entire family tree. This is what makes altering DNA in sperm, eggs, or embryos — known as germline editing — so powerful. But if something were to go wrong, like cutting an unintended place in the genome, the resulting child could have health problems or introduce new, potentially harmful mutations into the gene pool, where they could be difficult to eradicate. That risk has made the scientific community wary of using gene editing in this way.
The floodgates are open, and...
Related Articles
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 04.04.2024
Acompany started by University of Pennsylvania scientist Jim Wilson has received FDA approval to test a form of gene editing in infants for the first time in the United States, the company said Thursday.
The Plymouth Meeting company, iECURE, is...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...