He Jiankui had issues beyond just doing something bioethically controversial. He didn’t make the intended edits cleanly in any embryo (instead there were issues with off-target edits and mosaicism). If I remember correctly, he also misled the parents about the nature of the intervention.
All in all, if you look into the details of what he did, he doesn’t come out looking good from any perspective.
Good point, I didn’t address this at all in the post. Germline editing is indeed outside the current Overton window. One thing I’m curious about is whether there are any shreds of hope that we might be able to accelerate any of the relevant technical research: one thing this implies is not specifically focusing on the use case of enhancement, to avoid attracting condemnation (which would risk slowing existing research due to e.g. new regulations being levied).
For some techniques this seems harder than for others: iterated embryo selection is pretty clearly meant for enhancement (which could also mean animal enhancement, i.e. efficient livestock breeding). The Cas9 stuff has lots of potential uses, so it’s currently being heavily pursued despite norms. There’s also lots of ongoing work on the synthesis of simple genomes (e.g. for bacteria), with manycompaniesofferingsynthesisservices. Of course, the problems I identified as likely being on the critical path to creating modal human genomes are pretty enhancement specific (again, the only other application that comes to mind is making better livestock) which is unfortunate, given the massive (and quick!) upside of this approach if you can get it to work.
Current bioethics norms will strongly condemn this sort of research, which may make it challenging to pursue in the nearish term. The consensus is strongly against, which will make acquiring funding difficult and any human CRISPR editing is completely off the table for now. For example, He Jiankui CRISPR edited some babies in China to make them less susceptible to HIV and went to prison for it.
He Jiankui had issues beyond just doing something bioethically controversial. He didn’t make the intended edits cleanly in any embryo (instead there were issues with off-target edits and mosaicism). If I remember correctly, he also misled the parents about the nature of the intervention.
All in all, if you look into the details of what he did, he doesn’t come out looking good from any perspective.
That’s true, there was a huge amount of outrage even before those details came out however.
Good point, I didn’t address this at all in the post. Germline editing is indeed outside the current Overton window. One thing I’m curious about is whether there are any shreds of hope that we might be able to accelerate any of the relevant technical research: one thing this implies is not specifically focusing on the use case of enhancement, to avoid attracting condemnation (which would risk slowing existing research due to e.g. new regulations being levied).
For some techniques this seems harder than for others: iterated embryo selection is pretty clearly meant for enhancement (which could also mean animal enhancement, i.e. efficient livestock breeding). The Cas9 stuff has lots of potential uses, so it’s currently being heavily pursued despite norms. There’s also lots of ongoing work on the synthesis of simple genomes (e.g. for bacteria), with many companies offering synthesis services. Of course, the problems I identified as likely being on the critical path to creating modal human genomes are pretty enhancement specific (again, the only other application that comes to mind is making better livestock) which is unfortunate, given the massive (and quick!) upside of this approach if you can get it to work.