last week Small group of protesters in London be brave In the rain in front of the Francis Crick Institute, where the 3rd International Summit on Human Genome Editing was being held. A small congregation of the group Stop Designer Babies brandished billboards urging “never return to eugenics” and “no HGM” (no human genetic modification). The group is campaigning against the scientific community’s move to use gene editing for biological enhancement, to tweak the genome to give it greater intelligence or blue eyes. If this happens, the group argues, it will be a slippery slope to eugenics.
Three days later, when the summit ended, the group’s wishes seemed to have been partially granted. At least for the time being.
After several days of expert debate on scientific, ethical and governance issues related to human genome editing, the summit’s organizing committee issued its closing statement. Hereditary human genome editing (editing embryos that are transferred to establish pregnancies capable of transmitting edited DNA) “still remains unacceptable at this time,” the panel concluded. Policy debates continue and are critical in determining whether this technology should be used.”
Bioethicist Françoise Bayliss, who was a member of the organizing committee, says that the use of the word “whether” in the last sentence was carefully chosen and very important. The point is that the word is not “how”.
This marks a shift in attitudes since the closing of the last summit in 2018. At that time, Chinese scientist He Jiankui dropped the bomb. He reveals that he has also used his Crispr to edit human embryos before, giving birth to three of his Crispr-edited babies. — much to the horror of the summit attendees and the rest of the world. In its closing statement, the committee condemned He Jiankui’s premature actions, but at the same time gave germline genome editing a yellow rather than a red light. In other words, proceed with caution. It recommended setting up a “translational pathway” that could bring the approach into clinical trials in a rigorous and responsible manner.
Five years later, research confirms that germline genome editing is still too risky. And those concerns were only exacerbated at this year’s summit.
These include, for example, mosaicism, where some cells are edited differently than others as a result of genome editing. At the summit, biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University presented findings from his lab that show that germline genome editing has resulted in unintended and potentially dangerous tweaks to the embryo’s genome. bottom. Screening embryos before implantation may not pick them up. Another scientist, Dagan Wells, a reproductive biologist at the University of Oxford, has published a study that looked at how embryos repair DNA breaks after being edited. His research found that about two-fifths of embryos failed to repair the damaged DNA. Children who grow from such embryos may suffer from health problems.
The message was big and clear: Scientists still don’t know how to safely edit embryos.
For Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a California nonprofit that advocates a broad ban on genetic genome editing, these few lines in the committee’s closing statement came from the summit. was the most important thing. “I think this is an important step from the brink.”
However, more work is needed to determine whether hereditary germline editing is acceptable. “The conversation about whether we should do it needs to be much broader than what we saw at the summit,” Hasson says. Bayliss says we need to. She worries that the work won’t happen.To date, these summits have led discussions about where the field is headed, but whether or not a fourth summit will take place is uncertain. still unknown. “I don’t think we’ve had the tough talks we need yet,” she says Baylis.
