Arguably simple rules for using CRISPR without ending the world

An interesting thing about last year’s CRISPR babies debacle is that the scientific community thought it had set out pretty clear rules that would preclude such a thing, and yet the scientist behind the experiment believed he hadn’t broken them.

So, as STAT’s Sharon Begley reports, the scientific community is doubling down. The old rules, set out in 2017, “were not clear enough,” according to Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine.

Now the academy is uniting its counterparts in the U.K., China, and elsewhere to hammer out rules free of wiggle room. And that will involve thorny questions. What kinds of tests must scientists do to demonstrate that a potential embryonic edit is safe? How thoroughly must they search for off-target effects? And, perhaps most simple, which diseases are serious enough to merit CRISPR’ing embryos?

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