A Future of Genetically Engineered Children Is Closer Than You’d Think
By Rowan Jacobsen,
Mother Jones [cites Marcy Darnovsky]
| 08. 01. 2017
Last week, US scientists edited a human embryo for the first time. That’s just the beginning.
The first step is a no-brainer. Say you are one of the tens of thousands of people with Huntington’s disease, a terrible, hereditary neurodegenerative disorder caused by a mutation in the HTT gene. The diseased version of the gene makes an abnormally long protein that becomes toxic in your neurons, eventually killing them. Symptoms usually appear in your 30s or 40s as small twitching movements, a lack of coordination, and depression. In the coming years, the spasms will grow. It will be increasingly difficult to walk, talk, and think. Within 20 years, you will most likely be dead. You are resigned to your fate, but you and your partner would very much like to have kids, and you have no interest in passing this particular legacy to your child.
Today, your best bet is a procedure called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), in which embryos produced through in vitro fertilization (IVF) are screened for the unwanted gene. PGD has been a game changer for many...
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A Minnesota man was eating a hot dog at a hockey game when, the authorities said, he wiped his mouth with a napkin and tossed the remains in the trash.
It was the moment cold-case investigators had been waiting for....
By Marc Montgomery, Radio Canada International | 02.13.2019
CRISPR is a recent technological breakthrough in simplifying gene editing,
It’s potential is enormous and at the same time it raises great concerns. Those concerns exploded when a Chinese scientist edited the genetic sequence of an embryo (germline) to create twin...
Last year’s heritable human gene editing scandal continues to reverberate. He Jiankui remains under investigation in China, where authorities have confirmed his work but the extent of his punishment remains unclear, possibly because of some ambiguity in the applicable regulations. He has definitely been fired by his university.
In the US, both Rice University and Stanford are formally investigating faculty members whose involvement with the work may have been more extensive than first thought. Michael Deem of Rice was revealed...
After the heritable human gene editing headlines of late 2018, and considering that the stakes include the future of human biology and the prospect of a new high-tech eugenics, it is no surprise that discussions have continued. What was not widely anticipated, however, was the emergence of a connection between old-school transhumanism, mutated into biohacking, and modern cryptocurrency, in the service of monetizing “the production of designer babies and human germline genetic engineering.”
Antonio Regalado’s story in MIT Technology...
