Runaway Biology: A Call for Conscientious Genome Editing with CRISPR
By Søren Hough,
SFTP
| 01. 28. 2021
By 2018, it was clear that CRISPR had spun out of control. In the United States, one biotech company managed to bypass the Food and Drug Administration to get CRISPR-modified food onto people’s dinner plates. Not long after, a world-shaking report revealed that CRISPR had also been used without formal approval in China to edit the DNA of two baby girls, Lulu and Nana. As scientists and governments methodically deliberate on the best way to regulate CRISPR’s use in society, those seeking fame and fortune plow ahead heedless of the consequences. CRISPR, now a Nobel Prize-winning technology, is a permanent fixture in biological research and clinical medicine. We must take its dire ethical implications, from changing the food we eat to altering human evolution, more seriously.
Genetic Reductionism and CRISPR: Dire Bedfellows
When Drs. Jennifer Doudna and Emanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on CRISPR, the Nobel committee framed their discovery as a tool for rewriting the “code of life” DNA.https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2020/press-release/." title>1 Describing DNA as the “code of life” is a common trope, and...
Related Articles
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...
