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An international group of gene editing leaders has put out a call for a 10-year ban on heritable human genome editing (HHGE), extending a moratorium that was first proposed in the fallout of a Chinese researcher’s widely decried use of CRISPR on human embryos.
The call was made in a May 21 publication in Cytotherapy, the journal of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT), and stems from a March 26 meeting of prominent figures in gene editing. This includes ISCT CEO Queenie Jang; David Barrett, CEO of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy; Miguel Forte, M.D., president of ISCT and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics; Devyn Smith, Ph.D., CEO of Arbor Biotechnologies; Tim Hunt, CEO of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine; and Paula Cannon, Ph.D., a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
“Because HHGE provokes fundamental questions related to the nature of the human person and the future of humanity, individual scientists, acting alone without transparency or regulatory oversight, should not decide the timing and conditions for any potential HHGE...