Scientists made 1 small edit to human embryos. It had a lot of unintended consequences.
June 16, 2020 11:21 a.m.
A human embryo editing
experiment gone wrong has scientists warning against treading into the field
altogether.
To understand the role of a
single gene in early human development, a team of scientists at the
London-based Francis Crick Institute removed it from a set of 18 donated
embryos. Even though the embryos were destroyed after just 14 days, that was
enough time for the single edit to transform into "major unintended
edits," OneZero reports.
Human gene editing is a taboo
topic — the birth of two genetically modified babies in 2018 proved
incredibly controversial, and editing embryos beyond experimentation is not allowed in the U.S. The scientists in London
conducted short-term research on a set of 25 donated embryos, using the CRISPR
technique to remove a gene from 18 of them. An analysis later revealed 10 of
those edited embryos looked normal, but that the other eight revealed
"abnormalities across a particular chromosome," OneZero writes.
Of them, "four contained inadvertent deletions or additions of DNA
directly adjacent to the edited gene," OneZero continues.
The unintended edits exemplify
the single biggest concern of gene editing, especially when it involves humans.
And to Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing expert and professor of molecular and cell
biology at the University of California, Berkeley, it sends a clear message:
"This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living
daylights away from embryo editing."
The results of this experiment
were published in the preprint server bioRxiv, which has yet to be peer
reviewed and published in a medical journal. Read more at OneZero. Kathryn Krawczyk
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