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In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined practical steps that countries and research institutions could take to discourage this sort of experimentation, such as strengthening regulations tied to gene editing.
“Germline editing has very serious safety concerns that could have irreversible consequences,” said Bruce Levine, a cancer gene therapy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and former president of the ISCT, in a statement. “We simply lack the tools to make it safe now and for at least the next 10 years.”
Newer technologies such as CRISPR have made gene editing easier, cheaper, and more practical to carry out in a variety of species, humans included. That reality has made heritable germline editing—altering egg, sperm, and embryos such that they can be passed down to offspring—more feasible than ever.
In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui thrust this issue into the limelight when he announced that...