Global Gene Editing Conference Declines To Ban Eventual Use in Humans

"An international conference on gene editing on Thursday left the door open to future use, in humans, of new techniques that alter an organism's genetic architecture in ways that carry forward to future generations.

With questions of safety, need and ethics still unanswered, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; the United Kingdom's Royal Society; and the Chinese Academy of Science agreed that "it would be irresponsible to proceed with any clinical use of germline editing."

Issuing a statement on the final day of a three-day colloquy, the gathered scientists did not close the door on the eventual clinical use of such "germline editing," in which the DNA of eggs, sperm or embryos are altered in ways that would be carried by all of the cells of a resulting child and passed on to subsequent generations as part of the human gene pool."

Melissa Healy reports for the Los Angeles Times December 3, 2015.