Hastings President in Scientific American Calls for Gene Editing Guidance to Address More Than Safety
Hastings Center President Mildred Solomon calls for new public forums and strategies for discussing the ethical implications of editing the human genome in ways that can be passed down to future generations. She praises an international commission, which held the first of two meetings last week to develop a clearer governance framework to prevent more scientists from editing human embryos and implanting them so that they can develop into babies – as a Chinese scientist did last year and a Russian scientist has proposed doing – in violation of guidelines that their peers have established. The meeting “got off to a great start, with calls for more scientific transparency and renewed commitments to generating a global framework to establish parameters for this research,” Solomon writes in the Scientific American blog. But she warns that it will be easier to focus only on safety, which “is the bare minimum that just about everyone can agree on.” Cautioning that human genome editing will also open the door to enhancements, she urges that we “enter this discussion with eyes wide open, considering each application on its own merits and anticipating a wide range of issues that go well beyond safety.” Read the article.
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