CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ OPENING THE DOORS FOR DESIGNER BABIES? … until defined issues are sufficiently solved, the word moratorium is never used in them. David Baltimore of California Institute of Technology who chaired the Organizing Committee of both Summits says that the term moratorium was omitted on purpose “because people mistake it for a permanent ban and it would be hard to reverse. A moratorium limits your options and doesn’t send the message that people might benefit from this one day.” However, in March 2019, eighteen respected scientists from seven countries called in an article published in Nature for “ a global moratorium on all clinical uses of germline editing” for at least five years and proposed a mechanism for ensuring the moratorium 72 . According to the article’s leading author, Eric S. Lander of MIT, a rogue action of a team of scientists cannot be prevented but much more dangerous situation would arise if a whole country started to support germline editing 73 . The call was supported by the National Institutes of Health. In an official statement, the NIH director Francis S. Collins stated that “[u]ntil nations can commit to international guiding principles to help determine whether and under what conditions such research should ever proceed, NIH strongly agrees that an international moratorium should be put into effect immediately”. 74 An expert discussion followed, some authors claiming that the Summits established a de facto moratorium while others believed that the clear and explicit use of the term moratorium in the 2015 Statement would have prevented Jiankui’s experiment. 75 It should also be noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) recently established its Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing . At its first meeting from 18 to 19 March 2019, the Committee produced three recommendations. First, it called WHO to develop a registry of human genome editing studies. Without registration in the registry, the research should not be founded and its results should not be published in scientific journals. Second, the Committee expressed its agreement with the view that proceeding with the clinical application of human germline editing would be irresponsible at this time. Third, the Committee stressed that WHO should actively seek the views on human genome editing “from the broadest possible range of stakeholders” . 76 dangerous. The Niche. Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog. (26 November 2018.) accessed 30 May 2019. 72 LANDER, Eric S., BAYLIS, Françoise, ZHANG, Feng, CHARPENTIER, Emmanuelle, BERG, Paul, BOURGAIN, Catherine, FRIEDRICH, Bärbel, JOUNG, J. Keith, LI, Jinsong, LIU, David, NALDINI, Luigi, NIE, Jing-Bao, QIU, Renzong, SCHOENE-SEIFERT, Bettina, SHAO, Feng, TERRY, Sharon, WEI, Wensheng, WINNACKER, Ernst-Ludwig. Adopt a moratorium on heritable genome editing. Nature. (2019, Vol. 567, No. 7747), pp. 165-168. Also available at accessed 30 May 2019. 73 See BEGLEY, Sharon. Leading scientists, backed by NIH, call for a global moratorium on creating “CRISPR babies”. STAT. (13 March 2019.) accessed 30 May 2019. 74 COLLINS, Francis F. NIH supports international moratorium on clinical application of germline editing. The National Institutes of Health. (13 March 2019.) accessed 30 May 2019. 75 For a brief overview of the discussion, see BEGLEY, Sharon. Leading scientists, backed by NIH, call for a global moratorium on creating “CRISPR babies”. STAT. (13 March 2019.) accessed 30 May 2019. 76 WHO Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing. Report of the First Meeting. (2019.) accessed 30 May 2019.

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