At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Dr Victor Dzau, President of the National Academy of Medicine in the United States, said that the current guidelines for gamete and embryo genome editing were “not clear enough”. He called for a review of the current recommendations, and announced that a commission is in the process of “creating a more rigorous regulatory framework”. The British Royal Society, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and other international scientific and medical groups are already on board. The aim is to “make it more difficult for rogue scientists to justify unethical research”, following the dramatic example of genetically modified babies in China (see GMO Babies: unwitting guinea pigs). He Jiankui’s research that led to the birth of these children was in fact in accordance with the guidelines issued in 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine (see CRISPR: the international ethics committee surrenders).
Bioedge, Xavier Symons (28/01/2019)