CRISPR will get easier and easier to administer. But what does that mean for the future of our species? In 2023, 30% of people surveyed would edit an embryo if it enhanced the child’s chance of attending a top-ranked college.
If anyone did create an edited baby, it would raise moral and ethical issues, among the profoundest of which was that doing so would be “changing human evolution.” Any gene alterations made to an embryo that successfully developed into a baby would get passed on to any children of its own, via what’s known as the germline. What kind of scientist would be bold enough to try that?
The birth of genetically tailored humans would be something between a medical breakthrough and the start of a slippery slope of human enhancement.
If you made the adjustment at the moment an egg is fertilized, you would only have to change one cell in order for the change to take hold in the embryo and, eventually, everywhere in a person’s brain. Trying to edit an individual’s brain after birth “is as hard a delivering a person to the moon, but if you deliver gene editing to an embryo, it’s as easy as driving home.”
In the future, human embryos will be corrected for all severe genetic diseases. But they will also receive “a panel” of “perhaps 20 or 30” edits to improve health.
SOURCE MATERIAL : https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/22/1096458/crispr-gene-editing-babies-evolution/ by: Antonio Regalatto. August 22, 2024
SOURCE MATERIAL: https://x.com/Jiankui_He/status/1674226970614452227
