Don’t miss the “Draft Ethical Principles for Therapeutic Assisted Reproductive Technologies” just published by He Jiankui et al. in The CRISPR Journal. It seems the Lulu and Nana’s experiment is at odds even with their own guidelines. We are eager to hear more from He’s voice, his talk in Hong Kong is scheduled on Wednesday, 28 November 2018 (Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing-live broadcast)
Just imagine you could find them all on the supermarket shelves, would you buy rice labeled as CRISPR or GMO, or stick to conventional non-genetically modified rice? And what price would you consider fair? Aaron Shew and colleagues from the University of Arkansas conducted a multi-country assessment of willingness-to-pay for and willingness-to-consume a hypothetical CRISPR-produced food and published their findings in Global Food Security. Continue reading
The European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors has published a statement on gene editing and the GMO directive, following the controversial judgment released last July by the EU Court of Justice. They state that new scientific knowledge and recent technical developments made Directive 2001/18 “no longer fit for purpose.” Therefore “there is a need to improve EU GMO legislation to be clear, evidence-based, implementable, proportionate and flexible.” The document was welcomed by Carlos Moedas, Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, and Vytenis Andriukaitis, Commissioner for Health and Food Safety. Let’s hope actions will follow, and laws keep up with labs.
credit McKylan Mullins
If a donor template is not provided when CRISPR cuts the DNA, broken ends are fixed by natural repairing mechanisms in a way that is considered stochastic and heterogeneous. This makes template-free editing impractical beyond gene disruption, right? Wrong, according to a study published in Nature by Richard Sherwood and colleagues. Continue reading
BioArt is entering the genome-editing era. The first CRISPR artwork is a World War II dress, patched with silk and bacteria by British bioartist Anna Dumitriu. You can read more about its science and meaning in the CRISPR Journal and Labiotech. But where does the dress come from? And if this is art indeed, what about the galloping horse CRISPRed by George Church last year? I asked Dumitriu, please find the answers below. Continue reading
A proposal from the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment points the way out of the GM regulatory impasse for most CRISPR crops in Europe. Rather than trying to clarify ambiguous definitions, the EU could simply amend Annex B1, that is the list of technologies that are excluded from regulation by the directive on GMOs (2001/18/EC). Continue reading
Healthy adult bimaternal mouse (born to two mothers) with offspring of her own.
Credit: Leyun Wang
Single-gender worlds will remain a sci-fi fantasy. Gay and lesbian couples won’t become parents this way for the foreseeable future. This kind of manipulation is just too risky for humans. But unisexually reproducing mice are an impressive accomplishment, and CRISPR stands out again as a powerful research tool, opening up brand new possibilities for the study of genomic imprinting. For further details, please see the STAT News article about the Cell Stem Cell paper by Zhi-Kun Li.
It’s another CRISPR first: fixing a hereditary disease in utero. Scientists from Pennsylvania University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia used a base editor to rescue tyrosinemia in fetal mice. “The results of this proof-of-concept work demonstrate the possibility of efficiently performing gene editing before birth, pointing to a potential new therapeutic approach for selected congenital disorders,” Avery C. Rossidis and colleagues write in Nature Medicine. Continue reading
“Agricultural research, or a new bioweapon system?”. This is the question asked by Guy Reeves et al. in a policy forum published in Science today. The evolutionary geneticist from the Max Planck Institute and his German and French coauthors doubt that the Insect Allies program funded by Darpa in the US will realize significant agricultural benefits, e.g. in relation to drought, frost, flooding, herbicide, salinity, or disease. They fear, indeed, that it will be “widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their delivery, which – if true – would constitute a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention.” Continue reading
The trolley problem is a classic philosophical dilemma, and its variants have been used extensively to test moral intuitions. Scanning the brain of human subjects with functional MRI during task performance has proven useful to understand how emotion and reason interact when we ponder bioethical issues. It would be interesting to adopt those approaches to study the psychological barriers towards controversial innovations such as gene drives. Just imagine you alone are responsible for pressing a button and switching on gene drives in malaria-spreading mosquitoes. Someone is going to die, and you must decide whom to save. Continue reading
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