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CRISPR babies: when will the world be ready?

Efforts to make heritable changes to the human genome are fraught with uncertainty. Here’s what it would take to make the technique safe and acceptable.
  1. Heidi Ledford
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Jeff Carroll had been married for six months when he and his wife decided not to have children. Carroll, 25 years old and a former corporal in the US Army, had just found out that he had the mutation that causes Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that ravages the brain and nervous system and invariably ends in an early death. He had learnt that his mother had the disease about four years earlier, and now he knew that he was all but certain to develop it, too.

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Nature 570, 293-296 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01906-z

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 24 June 2019: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong name for the gene associated with lower cholesterol levels and cited an inappropriate reference for the finding. It also gave the wrong reference for the study based on UK Biobank data.

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