ISTOCK, UGURHANUpdate (October 3): Yesterday, Nature’s editors issued a note related the study. “Readers are alerted that some of the conclusions of this paper are subject to critiques that are being considered by editors. Some of these critiques have been publicly deposited in preprint form. A further editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues.”
In a seminal study published earlier this month in Nature, researchers used CRISPR gene-editing technology to repair a heart-disease inducing genetic mutation in human embryos. But not everyone in the scientific community bought their results.
This week, six scientists published a critique of the paper in the open-access preprint server bioRxiv. The team of skeptics, including Maria Jasin of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, took issue with one unexpected finding, namely, that the embryos used the healthy maternal DNA as a template to correct the defective sequence, rather than the DNA provided externally by the researchers.
The authors of the Nature paper, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University, targeted a small genetic mutation in the MYBPC3 gene known to cause hypertrophic ...
