My first job in science was as a lab technician at UCSD School of Medicine and a big part of that job was growing cells called HUVECs or human umbilical vein endothelial cells. We isolated and grew the HUVECs from umbilical cords that we retrieved from the maternity ward of the UCSD hospital, which first …
Why we shouldn’t view the human embryo as a gizmo even in the CRISPR era Read More »
The debate over whether the main conclusions of the Nature paper on human embryo CRISPR led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov’s lab at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) are correct remains unresolved. Note that Nature just added an editorial alert just above the references section to their paper: “Updated online 02 October 2017. Editorial Note: Readers are alerted that some …
Why Mitalipov’s ‘magic’ room for human embryo CRISPR may give us pause Read More »
Scientist make knockout human embryos with CRISPR? Today we see a new Nature paper (Fogarty, et al.) on CRISPR “gene editing” of human embryos, this time from the UK from Kathy Niakan’s group. Niakan got UK permission about 18 months ago to CRISPR healthy human embryos so they’ve been hard at work since. Because Fredrik …
1st Knockout Human Embryos Made with CRISPR: My Take on the Pub Read More »
What really happened at the DNA level in the experiments in that high-profile CRISPR of human embryos paper from a team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov at OHSU? Is the team right that they successfully conducted CRISPR of human embryos to correct a mutant gene, as they reported in their Ma, et al. Nature paper? Or is the Egli, …
Mulling over that Mitalipov human embryo CRISPR pub, still many questions Read More »
There has been a wave of intense discussions both in the public domain such as on Twitter and behind the scenes over the new Egli, et al. preprint that challenges the main conclusions of the Ma, et al. Nature paper from Shoukhrat Mitalipov’s lab. Ma, et al. reported CRISPR gene editing of human embryos, arguing for …
Mitalipov briefly responds to Egli preprint, stands by human embryo CRISPR pub findings Read More »
Is it possible that CRISPR gene editing actually didn’t happen in many of the human embryos in that big Nature paper that made such news a couple weeks back? Some doubts have emerged that call the main conclusions of the paper into question and argue that more definitive studies are needed to be sure. An …
Doubts raised on key points of Nature paper on CRISPR gene editing of human embryos Read More »
The FDA sent a stern letter today to Dr. John Zhang, PhD, MD, the physician who last year created a genetically modified human embryo in the U.S. and then exported it to Mexico where he self-reported creating a genetically modified baby boy. While the genetically modified baby created in Mexico was reportedly seemingly OK, it’s not clear …
FDA chides US doc who genetically modified human embryo in reported 3-person IVF Read More »
In the same way perhaps that some excited relatives or parents-to-be both gush and worry about a baby before it is even born, our field has been transfixed for a week by the Mitalipov paper on CRISPR’ing human embryos even though the paper just now came out. Now that the paper is out, we can …
Review of Mitalipov paper CRISPR’ing human embryos: transformative work on the edge Read More »
The human embryo CRISPR paper with Shoukhrat Mitalipov as senior author is coming soon. It will reportedly be focused on the use of CRISPR to genetically modify viable human embryos for reversal of a disease-associated mutation. While strangely press already broke early on this paper last week, as much as a week before the paper …
Big 5 questions anticipating Mitalipov human embryo CRISPR paper Read More »
The new CRISPR human embryo paper from Shoukhrat Mitalipov is stirring things up, but then there’s also the murky back story as to how the news of this as yet unpublished paper got leaked in the first place. The actual paper is still not out and from what I understand hasn’t even been officially released …