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Today (July 12), the World Health Organization released two reports outlining global recommendations for regulating human genome editing, with an emphasis on ensuring ethical and equitable use of the technology.
“Human genome editing has the potential to advance our ability to treat and cure disease,” says WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement. “But the full impact will only be realized if we deploy it for the benefit of all people,” he adds, “instead of fueling more health inequity between and within countries.”
Since the discovery that the CRISPR-Cas9 system could be used for precision gene editing in 2012 and the explosion of research that followed, Gattaca-like ethical questions have become more immediate. Should we use gene editing in humans at all? What about editing genes in a way that the genetic edits will be passed on to the next generation? Who will ...
