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CRISPR-edited babies arrived, and regulators are still racing to catch up

Nature Medicine volume 25, pages 1634–1636 (2019)Cite this article

One year after the world learned of He Jiankui’s editing of twins, gaps in rules remain.

When He used the popular CRISPR-Cas9 tool to try and disable the molecular pathway that HIV uses to infect cells in twin girls when they were embryos, there was no existing international moratorium against creating CRISPR babies, or penalties in China for doing so. Warnings had emerged from gene-editing conferences, but apparently they were not clear or emphatic enough. He, for instance, maintained that he’d followed the best practices set forth in 2017 by a panel of leading US scientists and ethicists, checking all the boxes related to safety and oversight. His work represented a significant leap in germline gene editing, which introduces heritable changes and therefore has the potential to stamp out rare, devastating genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy. Yet serious concerns abound about off-target effects.

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  1. Missoula, Montana, USA

    Alisa Opar

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  1. Alisa Opar
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Opar, A. CRISPR-edited babies arrived, and regulators are still racing to catch up. Nat Med 25, 1634–1636 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-019-0641-x

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