Our Focus on the Future Present

It’s been a rather wild ride in the last month, which hasn’t left much time for blog posts. But I’m planning to  turn over a new leaf and start posting at least something short at the beginning of every week.

This week’s post addresses a question that I’ve been asked in many ways by many people: what about germline editing? After the IGI started the ball rolling with a small meeting in Napa, we penned a call for a temporary moratorium on germline editing and have been lobbying for a larger summit, which is now slated for October. I think it likely that restriction or proscription of germline editing will be the outcome.

At this time, the IGI Lab will not do research on human germline editing for several reasons, including:

1. The IGI Lab is focusing on diseases for which somatic (non-heritable) editing would be a transformative advance. The media loves to talk about designer babies, but we actually don’t know the first thing about the genetic basis behind complex traits like beauty of intelligence. But we do know a lot about genetic disease, particularly so-called monogenic disorders, in which a problem in a...