Institute of Medicine: Three Parent Babies Are Ethically Permissible
Institute of Medicine: Three Parent Babies Are Ethically Permissible
The Institute of Medicine has concluded that it ethically permissible to create “three-parent babies” in clinical experiments as long as certain guidelines are followed and limited to boys only. The FDA must now decide whether to allow the experiments to move forward. These babies result from a procedure known as mitochondrial replacement therapy, mitochondrial transfer or three-person IVF. The…
Nature mix signals on 3-person IVF: deep risks, but forge ahead
Nature mix signals on 3-person IVF: deep risks, but forge ahead
Nature recently published a very thorough, insightful piece on the major risks that would come with the use of so-called 3-person IVF (aka mitochondrial transfer or 3-parent baby method).
In the UK 3-person IVF has, as of earlier this year, the government’s blessing to proceed despite the many serious unresolved risks that Nature‘s own piece so nicely outlines. Some scientists including myself…
The use of genome-modification tools in wild species must be properly governed to avoid irreversible damage to ecosystems, says Jeantine Lunshof.
Some critics argue that the unpredictable effects that human germline genome editing could have on future generations make it dangerous and ethically unacceptable. Uncertainty, however, is not a useful way to judge ethical acceptability. Others highlight the potential non-therapeutic purposes of germline modification. From the standpoint of ethics, it is not clear why trait modification is by definition a bad thing. Moreover, the criteria for what is therapy and what is ‘enhancement’ are fluid.
The consequences of modifying human genomes will be limited because effects will always be restricted to humans — the index person and their line of descendants. Biosafety and biosecurity risks are not apparent at this moment. Regulation, if and when it comes, might need to be adapted to the local situation, to existing legislation and to cultural and religious normative frameworks.
Presented in those terms, the human applications of CRISPR are much less troubling than the possibility of ecosystem modification. By definition, such disruption has more severe, complex, system-level consequences, and the breadth of its impact and the duration of its effects are hard to model. Gene drives are designed to be reversible, but this still needs to be tested. Self-propagating modified organisms cannot be contained within national borders and pose major challenges for regulation and governance. We therefore need an urgent review of biosafety and biosecurity protocols for experiments — both in the lab and in field-scale trials — that combine CRISPR and gene-drive techniques in wild organisms. Funders and institutions must lay out and enforce regulations.
