Gene editing human babies
Dec. 9th, 2018 12:53 pmI'll probably get round to making a post noodling about different social media platforms and gathering links about the Tumblr purge and so on. But lots of people have interesting views about that. For now, something to make my journal interesting to all my potential new readers where I have a specific contribution to make:
Who has been following this real-life horror story where a scientist claims to have gene edited human babies? It's absolutely all over the technical press but I haven't seen much lay discussion. If any of this story is true, it's a massive first with extremely far ranging implications. Let me break this down: He Jiankui is claiming that he has edited the genes of human embryos and that twin girls were born a couple of weeks ago with their genes deliberately altered. That means every cell in their bodies will express the edited sequence. If they go on to have children of their own, their offspring and all future generations of their descendants will have this alteration. (The account is slightly confusing because the romanization of the scientist's name, He, is identical to the male singular pronoun. Sorry about that.)
If it's real. If it's real it's as big as human cloning, and it's also a complete ethical disaster with bad science at every stage.
( this is not the SF future we were hoping for )
Please feel free to ask any questions. I haven't done CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing myself but I have a 20-year career of doing that sort of experiment but with worse tools, and I'm happy to explain this stuff at whatever level is most helpful.
Who has been following this real-life horror story where a scientist claims to have gene edited human babies? It's absolutely all over the technical press but I haven't seen much lay discussion. If any of this story is true, it's a massive first with extremely far ranging implications. Let me break this down: He Jiankui is claiming that he has edited the genes of human embryos and that twin girls were born a couple of weeks ago with their genes deliberately altered. That means every cell in their bodies will express the edited sequence. If they go on to have children of their own, their offspring and all future generations of their descendants will have this alteration. (The account is slightly confusing because the romanization of the scientist's name, He, is identical to the male singular pronoun. Sorry about that.)
If it's real. If it's real it's as big as human cloning, and it's also a complete ethical disaster with bad science at every stage.
( this is not the SF future we were hoping for )
Please feel free to ask any questions. I haven't done CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing myself but I have a 20-year career of doing that sort of experiment but with worse tools, and I'm happy to explain this stuff at whatever level is most helpful.
