By Adrian Villalba, Anna Smajdor, Iain Brassington and Daniela Cutas In our paper, we outline the ethical landscape surrounding the synthesis of human DNA. Only small genomes such as those of bacteria and yeast have been synthesized so far, but the creation of full human genomes in the lab is plausible. The idea of crafting […]
Category: Genome editing
He Jiankui & Humanity’s Common Heritage
By Richard B. Gibson As many will remember, in 2018, now infamous Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced on YouTube that, using CRISPR/Cas9, he had been (jointly) responsible for creating gene-edited twins called Lulu & Nana. He and his team’s purported aim was to engineer the twins to be resistant to HIV infection. Two days after […]
Mind the anticipatory gap: factoring future moral change into the governance of human genome editing
By John Danaher. Human genome editing is a potentially transformative emerging technology. Current clinical trials of CRISPR, for example, suggest it can be used as a therapeutic to treat a wide range of hereditary and acquired diseases. More speculatively, it could also be used as an enhancer, improving the capacities of generally normal or healthy […]