Moratorium on designer children
The creators of CRISPR have called for a global moratorium on CRISPR people
Olga Dobrovidova, N+1
One of the developers of the CRISPR/Cas genome editing technology, Feng Zhang and Emmanuel Charpentier, as well as their colleagues from seven countries, called for a global moratorium on the use of genetic editing of viable human embryos for the birth of CRISPR people, as Chinese scientist Jiankui He did. The call for a moratorium, supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), is published in the journal Nature (Landeret al., Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing.
Hae previously stated that twins were born in November, in which he tried to create resistance to HIV infection. He spoke about his work in an interview with the Associated Press, there is still no published scientific article about his research or independent confirmations. The Chinese authorities in January announced the preliminary results of the investigation of He's work, confirming not only the existence of twins Lulu and Nana, but also another pregnancy of the participant of the experiment, and later published a draft of guidelines governing experiments on genetic editing and other biomedical technologies.
Zhang, Charpentier and 16 other scientists, among whom there is, for example, Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute, call for a temporary moratorium on experiments with genetic editing of human germ line cells for clinical purposes, that is, to create genetically modified children. Zhang himself has personally called for a similar moratorium immediately after the announcement of the Chinese scientist's experiment.
By a temporary moratorium of a limited period of validity (they consider a five-year period appropriate), the manifesto authors understand the voluntary refusal of such experiments until a number of conditions are confidently fulfilled. Among such conditions, in particular, mandatory informing of the international community and consultations even before the approval of the experiment, a transparent process of evaluating the application for its conduct and demonstrating consensus in society about the appropriateness of this experiment. "Countries can choose different paths, but they must agree to work openly and with respect for the opinion of humanity on an issue that ultimately concerns the entire species," the scientists write. They emphasize that the moratorium will not concern the editing of embryos for scientific purposes without planting them in the uterus, as well as the editing of somatic cells for the treatment of diseases.
"Although technology has evolved over the past few years, germ line cell editing is not yet safe or effective enough to be used for clinical purposes... the scientific community agrees that for such an application, the risk of not receiving the necessary changes or the occurrence of unforeseen mutations is still unacceptably high. Significant research work is being carried out in this direction," the document says.
The authors also distinguish between genetic correction, designed to protect against diseases, and genetic "enhancement" of beneficial parameters in humans. If they consider the latter absolutely unacceptable at this stage, then the issue of protecting the unborn child from diseases, from their point of view, is more complicated. They remind that today couples with a high risk of transmitting a mutation that causes a particular disease have the possibility of in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Scientists believe that improving these procedures is still a safer and more effective way to prevent the transmission of genetic diseases.
According to the authors of the manifesto, decisions on such experiments should not be made only by the scientific community without a broad public discussion. In addition, they urge all researchers or organizations that have become aware of such experiments or their plans to make this information public (scientists emphasize that people who knew about He's experiments did not make efforts to stop them). The journal Nature in an editorial notes that, perhaps, a system similar to the system of disclosure of information about experiments with a potential biosafety risk is appropriate here.
The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering of the USA in their comments refrained from directly supporting the moratorium, but noted that they share the concerns of the authors of the manifesto in the journal and have already created an international commission on scientific and ethical issues of human genome editing.
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