Scientists Can’t Be Trusted on Gene Editing
By Pete Shanks,
The Progressive
| 08. 14. 2019
Scientific self-regulation is only as effective as the field’s ability to corral its strongest egos.
In mid-July, a bipartisan trio of U.S. Senators—Democrats Dianne Feinstein of California and Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Republican Marco Rubio of Florida—introduced a resolution calling for the creation of an international commission to set ethical standards for gene-editing research.
How badly is this needed? Let’s just look at what has happened since.
On August 2, Science magazine published a deeply researched article by staff writer Jon Cohen about the “circle of trust” surrounding the work of Dr. He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who in 2018 edited the heritable genes of human embryos. He then took the unprecedented step of using these to initiate and bring pregnancies to term.
Cohen found that at least eight senior American academics, including a Nobel laureate, knew what Dr. He was trying to do. (In total, perhaps 60 people worldwide were aware.) Almost all of them told him not to do it. None of them went public.
What Dr. He did is illegal in more than 40 countries (though not in China). But while the scientific community roundly condemned the experiment, Cohen...
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...