Editing the Human Genome
By BBC Newshour Extra,
BBC Newshour Extra
| 11. 28. 2015
Remarkable new techniques for ‘editing’ DNA – chemically cutting and splicing sections of genetic code – are revolutionising research in laboratories around the world. The potential for eradicating hereditary diseases is enormous. But are the benefits outweighed by the risks involved? And should these techniques ever be used on humans? On Newshour Extra this week, Owen Bennett Jones and his panel of expert guests discuss the scientific and ethical consequences of this latest research, and ask whether mankind should be tinkering with our genetic inheritance.
Contributors: Prof Robin Lovell-Badge - Head of Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics at the Francis Crick Institute; Michael Le Page -New Scientist magazine; Dr Annelien Bredenoord - Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University Medical Centre in Utrecht; Marcy Darnovsky - Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society, Berkeley, California; James Rushbrooke - playwrite; Edward Perello - co-founder of Desktop Genetics
Related Articles
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
By Miryam Naddaf, Nature | 09.21.2026
A wave of epigenetic therapies is offering hope as ways to cure chronic hepatitis B — a lingering liver infection that is caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and affects more than 250 million people around the world. Currently...
By Karen Weintraub, Endpoints News | 09.16.2026
To better understand certain neuropsychiatric disorders, researchers at Stanford University have bred rodents that lack a cortex and hippocampus and then replaced those missing brain cells with human ones.
The altered mice, a scientific first, provided insights that would not...
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 09.02.2026
The deaths of two children who received CRISPR therapies in China have rattled scientists who work on similar genetic medicines in the US, adding new fuel to a yearslong debate about the danger of the gene therapy field’s most-used delivery...
