Researchers gather in the National Academy of Sciences auditorium for first day of the Human Gene Editing Summit on December 1.JEF AKSTMore than 400 scientists, bioethicists, and historians from 20 countries on 6 continents have gathered this week in Washington, DC, for the Human Gene Editing Summit. The attendees are a veritable who’s who of genome editing: Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard—the three discoverers of the CRISPR-Cas9 system’s utility in gene editing—plus dozens of other big names in genome science. Cal Tech’s David Baltimore along with the heads of the four national societies hosting the meeting (US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.’s Royal Society) provided opening remarks on Tuesday (December 1). And as I sat stage right in the NAS auditorium, I noticed the unmistakable rear profile of Harvard Medical School’s George Church three rows in front of me.
Church was scheduled to speak at a session later that afternoon about the application of CRISPR and other new precision gene editing techniques to the human germline—a hot-button topic since April, when a Chinese group published it had successfully modified the genomes of human embryos, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it would not fund such research. Then in September, the U.S./U.K.-based Hinxton Group, an international consortium of scientists, policy experts, and bioethicists, said it supported the use of genetic editing in human embryos for limited applications in research and medicine.
But the debate continues, as opponents of the technology’s use in the human germline cite the near-term feasibility of “designer babies.” Three different speakers referenced a particularly chilling work of literature, starting ...
