NHGRIThis week in Washington, DC, the US National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.’s Royal Society are holding a meeting with leading gene-editing experts to discuss the use of tools like CRISPR/Cas9 on humans.
“It’s a very exciting time, but as with any powerful technology, there is always the risk that something will be done either intentionally or unintentionally that somehow has ill effects,” CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna told The Guardian Saturday (November 28).
On April 18, scientists from Sun Yat-sen University in China reported using CRISPR/Cas9 to edit human tripronuclear zygotes to cleave a gene involved in the blood disorder β thalassemia.
“I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale,” George Daley of Harvard Medical School told Nature at the time. Eleven days later, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said in a statement that his agency ...
