An international group of gene editing leaders has put out a call for a 10-year ban on heritable human genome editing (HHGE), extending a moratorium that was first proposed in the fallout of a Chinese researcher’s widely decried use of CRISPR on human embryos.
The call was made in a May 21 publication in Cytotherapy, the journal of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT), and stems from a March 26 meeting of prominent figures in gene editing. This includes ISCT CEO Queenie Jang; David Barrett, CEO of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy; Miguel Forte, M.D., president of ISCT and CEO of Kiji Therapeutics; Devyn Smith, Ph.D., CEO of Arbor Biotechnologies; Tim Hunt, CEO of the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine; and Paula Cannon, Ph.D., a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
“Because HHGE provokes fundamental questions related to the nature of the human person and the future of humanity, individual scientists, acting alone without transparency or regulatory oversight, should not decide the timing and conditions for any potential HHGE application,” the authors wrote.
HHGE specifically refers to edits to the human germ line, meaning reproductive cells like sperm and eggs. Changing the genome of these cells means that edits can be passed down to future generations, very different than edits in the rest of the body’s cells, which can’t be inherited.
In their call for a 10-year moratorium on HHGE, the authors point to the procedure’s unproven medical need and safety as well as the ethical ramifications of editing not just one person’s genome but the genomes of all their future descendants. Germ-line editing could be used for so-called “designer babies” with desired traits, the authors caution, which “raises the possibility of eugenics—the programmed enhancement of offspring for a privileged few.”
“Any justification for the application of HHGE, even in the context of severe unmet medical needs, must address its individual, societal and political impact on human dignity, equity and fairness,” the authors state.
The authors propose several measures to restrict HHGE and create guardrails for future research on the topic, including strengthening treaties and national laws, preventing the patenting of HHGE-related technologies and rescinding funding from researchers who pursue HHGE during the moratorium.
Gene editing researchers began calling for tighter controls of HHGE in 2019, after Chinese researcher He Jiankui, Ph.D., announced that twin girls had been born from embryos he gene edited using CRISPR. He was subsequently found guilty of an “illegal medical practice” and jailed for three years, with a 3 million Chinese yuan (about $430,000) fine.