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At meeting on guardrails for gene editing of human embryos, some call for a dead end
At meeting on human embryo editing, CRISPR pioneer says science is a long way from knowing if germline DNA can be safely altered.
WASHINGTON — Keith Joung knows better than a lot of people what, exactly, it might require to prove to regulators and patients that CRISPR could be safely used to alter the genome of a human embryo. If, of course, society decided that was a good idea.
Joung, an early pioneer of the gene-editing technology, was the first to show CRISPR could target and cut DNA inside an embryo — in zebrafish — back in 2013. Not long after, his group was among the earliest to discover that CRISPR could get a bit sloppy — inadvertently slicing up unintended regions of the genome in all sorts of cells — complicating hopes it might be used to cure illnesses from cancer to muscular dystrophy.
