Each year I make a list of predictions for the year to come for the stem cell and regenerative medicine field. Then about a year later I grade myself on how I did as that year winds down. Here’s how I did in 2016. For 2017, late in 2016 I made 20 stem cell predictions. Let’s now see how I did. I was wrong on 6 out of the 20 predictions and mostly right on the rest with some others in the middle that I colored …Read More
CRISPR human embryo
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 take a closer look at this “baby” and for us scientists that involves giving it a critical review. In science, “critical” often means a thorough once over with a …Read More
The first report of the use of CRISPR gene editing in normal human embryos was published today as a short paper from a team in China. There have been rumors for over a year that more CRISPR human embryo papers were coming including some using normal embryos. Here’s one and we can now expect more even as there remain scientific and ethical discussions about this kind of work. You can read the actual paper Tang, et al. here, published in the journal Molecular Genetics & Genomics. …Read More
In the past year there has been a great deal of attention given to the potential use of CRISPR-Cas9 for gene editing in human embryos. An important recent development, described in a new NPR article by Rob Stein, is the use of CRISPR-Cas9 in healthy human embryos for developmental biology research by assistant professor Fredrik Lanner of The Karolinska Institute. Dr. Lanner, who invited Stein into his lab to observe the work, kindly agreed to do a Q&A interview with me (below) on his …Read More
Last year I heard from several sources that there somewhere between 3-5 unpublished manuscripts reporting the use of CRISPR gene targeting in human embryos being shopped around at various journals in addition to the one that had been published. Since that time we’ve seen a grand total of one additional paper reporting on CRISPR of human embryos. So what gives? Were the sources wrong? I don’t think so and I believe there are additional labs pursuing research on the use of CRISPR in human embryos. …Read More