Developments in the realms of science and technology continue to produce advances that not only are exciting, but also potentially frightening. Promising and controversial biological technology has included cloning, embryonic stem cells, and in vitro fertilization. More recently is the addition of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a tool for editing humans.
From the standpoint of achieving widespread public visibility, part of the story begins with the first publication of the idea of CRISPR in June 27, 2012 online in the journal Science by Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier, a researcher born in France who was a faculty member at Umëa University in Sweden. They eventually were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. Shocking reactions occurred around the world in November 2018 when it was learned that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos, a development in genetics as dramatic as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first CRISPR’d individuals ever born as a result of experimentation by He Jiankui who claimed to have overseen the use of CRISPR to modify a gene in the human embryo called CCR5, a gene known to be important in allowing HIV to infect some human cells.
Readers with an interest in this topic may find it worthwhile to obtain a copy of a book that recently became available. It has the title, “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans” and it was written by Henry T. Greely, Professor of Law and Director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. This author provides useful background information to the He Jiankui announcement and how CRISPR was used by that researcher.
Human germline genome editing and CRISPR are explained in this publication, along with a description of ethical discussions about and the legal status of such editing. Three chapters detail the revelation of Jiankui’s experiment and the fallout from those revelations. Part III of the text deals with assessments, while Part IV asks more broadly about human germline genome editing. For example, Professor Greely does not pull any punches by judging the experiment involving the two babies as criminally reckless, grossly premature, and deeply unethical.
One editing possibility involves enhancement, i.e., not for enhanced protection against diseases, but for producing better than normal traits or abilities for athletics, education, music, personal beauty, and other prized attributes. Focusing on that kind of intervention may not be the most beneficial way for CRISPR technology to proceed. Instead, somewhere between treating disease and enhancing traits would be to edit disease-prevention genetic variations into an individual’s genome. Rather than editing out an unusual pathogenic variation in favor of a common variant, the procedure could be used to edit out a common, normal-risk variant and turn it into an uncommon (or even) rare variation that lowers the risk below the population average. The author also notes that the real problems with introducing disease-prevention variations to a genome are not with the process, but with the result.