The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) summit on Human Gene Editing will begin in a few days on December 1 in Washington, D.C. This summit is in part the extension of discussions that started at a more informal meeting on CRISPR earlier this year in Napa organized by Jennifer Doudna and colleagues.
The NAS meeting will bring together scientists, ethicists, and policymakers from around the world and in particular from the US, the UK, and China. These three countries are presently the hotbeds of human genetic modification research, both academically and commercially.
I’m planning to be there live blogging the meeting with posts right here on this blog to give a sense of what is going on, the mood at the meeting, and more including pictures. Hopefully I can do some quick interviews with speakers at the meeting as well.
Many questions surround this topic and I’m curious how the meeting will tackle them. Will a consensus for a moratorium on clinical use of CRISPR on humans be reached? How much participation by the public will occur? What kind of range of opinions will be presented?
You can follow the meeting on Twitter with the #GeneEditSummit hash tag.