A conference in Washington, organized by the Royal Society of London, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is examining the pros and cons of gene editing. The meeting of scientists from Dec. 1 to Dec. 3 will decide if editing genes outside the body is unethical or if holds the potential for medical breakthroughs.
The arguments for gene editing say that it offers cheap medical intervention for dreadful diseases and conditions that do not respond to traditional modes of treatment. Proponents say a ban on gene editing is invalid since it gives the most vulnerable patients a potential cure. However, critics say that using the process without addressing ethical concerns is unchecked.
The new technology capable of treating genetic diseases is called CRISPR (CAS9), which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, short DNA sequences that repeat.
"We sense that we are close to being able to alter human heredity,"David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate from the California Institute of Technology, said in his opening talks on Tuesday, The Christian Monitor reported. ''This is something to which all people should pay attention."
Chinese researchers, led by Junjiu Huang, were the first to use gene editing in embryos that would be passed on to the next generation. They used defective embryos to avoid ethical concerns at the time.
One differentiating factors about CRISPR CAS9 is the cost. "It's about 1,000 times cheaper for an ordinary academic to do," said Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church, according to The Washington Post. "It could be a game-changer."
Dr. Feng Zuang from MIT said that there are tweaks that can reduce the error during gene editing. However, he warned that technology has not made it safe to use gene editing in a clinical setting . "We certainly don't see this as a magic bullet," Zuang said ina statement, reported the Christian Science Monitor.