Once Science Fiction, Gene Editing Is Now a Looming Reality; The New York Times, July 22, 2020

Katie Hafner, The New York Times; Once Science Fiction, Gene Editing Is Now a Looming Reality

The prospect of erasing some disabilities and perceived deficiencies hovers at the margins of what people consider ethically acceptable.

"Professor Halley acknowledged the inherent tension between the huge benefits that gene-editing technology could bring in preventing serious diseases and disabilities for which there is no treatment, and what she calls the “potential risk of going down a road that feels uncomfortably close to eugenics.”

Less ethically freighted are therapies to cure serious diseases in people who are already living with them. “I think that there are opportunities to use gene-editing technologies to treat genetic diseases that don’t raise the societal implications of altering permanently patterns of human inheritance,” said Dr. Alex Marson, director of the Gladstone-UCSF Institute of Genomic Immunology in San Francisco."

Recent events highlight an unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping; The Economist, January 31, 2019

The Economist; Recent events highlight an unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping

Rich-world scientists conduct questionable experiments in poor countries

"Ethics dumping is the carrying out by researchers from one country (usually rich, and with strict regulations) in another (usually less well off, and with laxer laws) of an experiment that would not be permitted at home, or of one that might be permitted, but in a way that would be frowned on. The most worrisome cases involve medical research, in which health, and possibly lives, are at stake. But other investigations—anthropological ones, for example—may also be carried out in a more cavalier fashion abroad. As science becomes more international the risk of ethics dumping, both intentional and unintentional, has risen. The suggestion in this case is that Dr He was encouraged and assisted in his project by a researcher at an American university."

America Needs to Figure Out the Ethics of Gene Editing Now; Wired, 4/23/15

Nick Stockton, Wired; America Needs to Figure Out the Ethics of Gene Editing Now:

"In an international first, researchers in China have reported doing experiments that involve editing the genome of a human embryo. Ever since scientists developed the ability to cut and splice DNA, they have worried over the safety and ethical implications of applying those techniques to the human genome. Now, though the reported work was preliminary and not completely successful, researchers will have to contend with a challenging set of questions about this newly-opened genetic frontier...

Within the past few months, several groups of scientists around the world have called varying levels of caution1 on just this type of research—calling for no more human embryo modification. They’re worried about all the science-fiction problems you’d imagine: The technology has the potential to erase genetic diseases, but it could also be used to make designer humans. And this kind of genome editing is on what’s called the “germ line,” which is to say, the edits get passed along to subsequent generations.

WIRED spoke to many of the people who called for moratoriums in two of world’s top scientific journals, to see what they thought about this Chinese research, and what it means for prioritizing the national discussion on the ethics of germline editing."