Everything is possible with CRISPR,” the Baylor geneticist Hugo Bellen told Science News this week. “I’m not kidding.”
Others view the technology more darkly. The Brazilian bioethicist José Roberto Goldim argues that CRISPR has endowed humanity with “dangerous knowledge”—that is, knowledge that supposedly “accumulates more rapidly than the wisdom required to use it.”
The summit was convened on Tuesday at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences, which co-hosted the meeting with the National Academy of Medicine, the British Royal Society, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In his opening remarks, the Caltech biologist David Baltimore declared: “The overriding question is when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance.” Few researchers or ethicists object to eventually using CRISPR to fix broken genes in adults, but many are haunted by the specter of the much-dreaded “designer babies.”
These fears were ratcheted up earlier this year, when researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University published a study that described using CRISPR to modify genes for the inheritable disease beta thalassemia in nonviable human embryos. While some of the targeted genes were successfully changed, there were many off-target changes in the genomes too. The high rate of off-target edits could have been the result of using very early versions of the technology and the fact that the embryos had been double fertilized, which means that they carried three sets of chromosomes rather than the standard two.
Humanity’s track record of attempting to play God is not terribly encouraging.