Designing babies
        
            By Staff, 
                The Economist
             | 02. 21. 2025
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            One of the greatest scandals in modern science began with a late-2010s advertisement for HIV-positive couples looking to have children through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). The ad had been put out by a scientist named He Jiankui, a biologist then at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China. Several pairs responded. For each couple, Dr. He and his team harvested their sperm and eggs and created embryos through IVF. He edited a gene in each embryo using CRISPR, then did something that had never been done before: had the edited embryos implanted into the women’s wombs. The gene, CCR5, is responsible for a cell-surface protein which plays a key role in HIV infection. A natural variant of CCR5 blocks production of the protein and confers protection against HIV. It was this protection that Dr. He sought to give the embryos.
In November 2018, just before the second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, MIT Technology Review reported both that the experiments had taken place and that two of the embryos had, when implanted in the womb, resulted in successful...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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            Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           By Pam Belluck,  The New York Times | 10.17.2025
                                                        
     
    
    
            Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
                                                           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...