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The CRISPR Journal, Vol 2, No 5
Jodi Halpern, Sharon E. O'Hara, Kevin W. Doxzen, Lea B. Witkowsky, and Aleksa L. Owen
“…While essential, public input and principles are not sufficient to ensure ethical uses of this technology. We propose an approach that relies not only on agreed-upon principles and a democratic process but requires a Human Rights Impact Assessment to evaluate the potential burdens that such biomedical interventions may place on human rights.”
Read MoreIn ANYA, fictional scientist Dr. Seymour Livingston considers pursuing clandestine use of “gene-editing technology” to help a friend conceive. At the time of filming and now, that technology would be CRISPR.
As we wrote the script and filmed, our collaborators at PGED were working to educate legislators about genetics technologies, including CRISPR. Now the first law to directly regulate CRISPR has appeared in form of a California “human biohacking” bill demanding a warning on DYI genetic-engineering kits.
Article by Antonio Regalado for MIT Technology Review
Read MoreDuring the development of ANYA we had the privilege of attending several PGED congressional briefings. This is the first resolution I’ve noticed to come out in support of helping “forge an international consensus regarding the limits of ethical clinical use of genome-edited human embryos.”
Article by Jef Akst for the The Scientist
Image by istock.com
Read MoreANYA takes a fictional look at a couple, a scientist, and a small community deciding whether to pursue gene-editing to have a healthy baby. In the real world, the race is on to produce — and to regulate — gene-edited babies.
When we filmed ANYA, this kind of gene-editing was still fiction. But by last November, when we were in post-production, news broke that a Chinese scientist had created twin “CRISPR babies.” Now, a Russian molecular biologist plans to implant gene-edited embryos in HIV+ volunteer mothers as early as the end of 2019. His goal is similar: to edit the embryos’ CCR5 genes in a way that reduces the risks of passing on HIV in utero.
This proposal comes at a time when most scientists believe that experiments on “gene-edited babies” should be banned until an international ethical framework is in place.
Read Nature’s 6/10/19 article on Dr. Denis Rebrikov’s controversial proposal.
Read Nature’s 6/11/19 Editorial urging the scientific community to intervene. (Image credit: Yorgos Nikas/SPL)
ANYA encourages viewers to join the worldwide debate now underway on how best to regulate gene editing in human sperm, eggs, and embryos.
Read More“The scientist who edited the genomes of twin girls in an attempt to make them resistant to HIV might have inadvertently shortened their life expectancy.”
Article by Sara Reardon for Nature.
Image: Biophysicist He Jiankui helped to create the world's first gene-edited babies.
Image Credit: Mark Schiefelbein/AP/Shutterstock
The databases used in genetics research consist overwhelmingly of genomes from people of European descent. To boost the participation of marginalized communities in genetic studies, doctors must first win back their trust.
Article by: Eva Armesen for Undark
Visual by: University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability / Flickr
Read MoreInvestigations continue into Dr. He Jianku’s claim to have created the world’s first gene-edited babies. This article details responses from Dr. He’s American advisors when he was a postdoctoral fellow and grad student. The article raises a number of questions. Do faculty members — and academic institutions more generally — bear responsibility in the actions of the students they mentor? When does this obligation end? To whom should they report suspected ethical breaches or “corner cutting”? Especially when the students have moved on to other institutions or countries?
Article by Pam Belluck for the New York Times.
Image by Mark Schiefelbein, Associated Press: Dr. He’s team working on an embryo in a sperm injection microscope in Shenzhen, China.
Read More“A push to calculate a "genetic income score" using giant DNA databases raises a raft of ethical questions.”
Article by Megan Molteni, Wired.
Image by Lauren Joseph, Getty Images.
Read MoreOur family tree is getting bushier with each new study!
Today, a study published in CELL draws on DNA analysis of living Southeast Asians to show that a fourth species of humans lived alongside modern humans, Denisovans, and Neanderthals . What’s more, the Denisovans were surprisingly diverse and may have been the last group to live beside modern humans, contributing to the DNA of modern humans as recently as 15,000 years ago.
Article: Maya Wei-Haas, National Geographic
Image text: Jason Treat and Maya Wei-Haas, NG Staff
Image source: Murray P. Cox, Massey University
Evolutionary anthropologist John Hawks shares his thoughts on the meaning of the latest discovery in the human family tree: a previously undiscovered new species of human relatives named Homo luzonensis after the island in the Philippines where they lived.
This post to the Sapiens.org anthropology blog, puts the finding in perspective: over the past 20 years there’s been a boom of unprecedented new discoveries. Not all may merit the label “new species” but they speak to many-branched human tree and many opportunities for new exploration.
Read MoreUCLA’s “Hollywood Diversity Report 2019” shows that “despite gains in front of and behind the camera, women and minorities remain underrepresented in film and television. The study also included evidence that suggests audiences tend to prefer movies and TV shows that feature relatively diverse casts.”
By Tracy Brown for the LA Times, 2/21/19
Image Credit: Still from the animated film “Coco”
Read MoreANYA deals with unintended consequences of contemporary genetic technologies and broaches the related ethics.
Stories coming out in the news suggest we only scratched the surface of what’s coming. At the 2019 Festival of Genomics in London, I learned a new UK initiative to collect 5,000,000 human genomes for medical and insurance purposes. Norway and other countries have similar but smaller programs. More sequenced DNA means bigger more accurate data bases for personalized medicine, crime fighting, and other purposes.
From news coming out of China this week, it appears that mass collection of DNA has given us something else to worry about: surveillance, oppression, and thorny issues about how foreign corporations and academics participate in legitimizing activities that might be illegal or at least unethical at home.
Read the full article by Sui-Lee Wee for the NYT.
Read MoreFewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African-Americans. Edray Goins, who earned one of them, found the upper reaches of the math world a challenging place. His experiences offer insight into what academic life might be like for ANYA’s Dr. Seymour Livingston.
Read MoreHERE ARE A few things you can buy with $200: one bluetooth-controlled fire pit, 100 lab-grown Impossible White Castle sliders, access to the 6.4 billion base pairs that make up all the DNA coiled inside your cells. Veritas Genetics current promotion offers $199 genome sequencing (typically $999). (Meghan Molteni for Wired.)
Read MoreIt’s been a week of fast and furious headlines as the news of the first “CRISPR babies” spreads since the original announcement by MIT Technology Review on 11/25/18. It’s been fascinating to watch how different media cover the story. It will be interesting to see if the public ultimately embraces the technological advance or meets it with a collective shrug. (Preliminary news analysis by ANYA filmmaker, anthropologist Carylanna Taylor).
Read More“It felt as if humanity had crossed an important line: In China, a scientist named He Jiankui announced on Monday that twins had been born in November with a gene that he had edited when they were embryos. But in some ways this news is not new at all. A few genetically modified people already walk among us.” Carl Zimmer (New York Times) goes on to remind us of a few of these cases, three-parent embryos through “mitochondrial replacement therapy.”
Read MoreIn the Washington Post, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Sheila Jasanoff, and Krishanu Saha hold the scientific community partly responsible the gene-editing “experiment that was not supposed to happen.” It’s a helpful summary of where the news of the possible first "CRISPR babies” by Dr. He Jiankui (pictured) and his team fits into current scientific consensus or lack thereof.
Read MorePictured: American biologist & Nobel laureate in medicine David Baltimore criticized a fellow scientist, physicist He Jiankui, who claims he has edited the genes human embryos, during the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the University of Hong Kong. (NPR’s All Things Considered with Rob Stein)
Read MoreBioethicist and friend of ANYA, Jeantine Lunshof, and director of Harvard’s science & technology studies, Sheila Jasanoff spoke on WBUR Open Source with Chris Lydon talking gene-edited babies 11/29 @9pm. Listen to the full hour discussion.
Read MoreThis VERGE article by Angela Chen suggests that the so-called CRISPR babies may not be resistant to HIV as intended (and indeed may have a compromised immune system) and highlights several of the reasons why the scientific community is up in arms. We’ll know more if more data is released for peer review.
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