Gene editing receives key panel’s support despite ethics concern

An influential science advisory group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine on Tuesday lent its support to a once-unthinkable proposition: the modification of human embryos to create genetic traits that can be passed down to future generations.

This type of human gene editing has long been seen as an ethical minefield. Researchers fear that the techniques used to prevent genetic diseases might also be used to enhance intelligence, for example, or to create people physically suited to particular tasks, like serving as soldiers.

The advisory group endorsed only alterations designed to prevent babies from acquiring genes known to cause “serious diseases and disability,” and only when there is no “reasonable alternative.” The report provides an explicit rationale for genetic research that the federal government has avoided supporting until now, although the work is being pursued in countries like Sweden and China.

So-called germline engineering might allow people to have biological children without fear that they have passed on the genes for diseases like Huntington’s, Tay-Sachs and beta thalassemia and without discarding embryos carrying the mutations, as is often done now.

The new report heralds a day scientists have long warned is coming. After decades of sciencefiction movies, cocktail party chatter and college seminars in which people have idly debated the ethics of humanity intervening in its own evolution, advancing technology dictates that the public now make some hard choices.

“It is essential for public discussions to precede any decisions about whether or how to pursue clinical trials of such applications,” said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leader of the panel that wrote the report. “And we need to have them now.”

The advent of a powerful geneediting tool called CRISPR-Cas9 allows researchers to snip, insert and delete genetic material with increasing precision.

“Previously, it was easy for people to say, ‘This isn’t possible, so we don’t have to think about it much,’” said Richard Hynes, a cancer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped lead the committee with Charo.

“Now we can see a path whereby we might be able to do it, so we have to think about how to make sure it’s used only for the right things and not for the wrong things,” he said.

A more pragmatic concern driving the committee was the likelihood that the new technology would be adopted, in countries like China, where some pioneering research on editing human embryos — without the intent to gestate them — has already occurred.

“If we have an absolute prohibition in the United States with this technology advancing, it’s not like it won’t happen,” Charo said.