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February 1st, 2016 - Stanford Medicine Scope - by Krista Conger
Big news out of the United Kingdom today about the gene editing technology known as CRISPR/Cas9. Stanford law professor Hank Greely, JD, posted a brief take on his blog this morning applauding the move by the British Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to allow researcher Kathy Niakan, PhD, of the Francis Crick Institute to conduct gene editing experiments in early human embryos.
The BBC News and Nature each have good summaries of the science side of the ruling. Greely, who directs Stanford’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, breaks down the ethics. From his post:
This is important research that can only be done with human embryos, it is being done with surplus IVF embryos whose prospective parents agreed to this kind of use, and the researchers are forbidden to to try to produce human gene-edited babies.
Niakan’s experiments, tailored to increase our understanding of the very earliest stages of human development, will allow the modified embryos to develop for only 14 days, or until they consist of just a few hundred cells. She hopes that her findings will shed light on infertility and miscarriage.
