Three new studies reported in preprints all show severe DNA damage to human embryos from CRISPR a surprisingly high percentage of the time including in some cases loss of heterozygosity (LOH). Anywhere from about a quarter to half of CRISPR’d embryos exhibited major genome damage. As readers of The Niche know, I never was a fan of the idea of doing CRISPR on human embryos for reproductive use, although I have been supportive of limited, thoughtful in vitro gene-editing studies on human embryos. The …Read More
Shoukhrat Mitalipov
Two prominent scientists, Robin Lovell-Badge and George Daley, have been amongst the most outspoken proponents of leaving the door open to heritable human genetic modification via CRISPR. While they each have articulated their reasons in somewhat different ways at times, their core reasons arguing in favor of future heritable CRISPR appear largely the same. In this post I tackle each of these arguments in favor of leaving the door open to “CRISPR babies” with science-based counterarguments. I also raise larger risks to going down …Read More
The votes are in and the community has picked its top 10 Stem Cell Person of the Year Award finalists. Both the 20 nominees and now the 10 finalists are a diverse group. The finalists include six women and four men, from five countries and four different continents. We also got votes from readers of the blog from 32 different countries spanning every continent, which is exciting. This year’s finalists are mostly scientists, but it’s a diverse group that also includes advocates and the top vote …Read More
Nominations have closed for the 2017 Stem Cell Person of the Year Award and we have a great group of nominees. I’ve listed them below in alphabetical order, along with a bit of description of who they are, which includes in some cases the language used by the nominator(s). Where possible I’ve included a link to a helpful webpage about them. You can read more about this award here in an archive of posts about it over the years. Note that folks at stem cell clinics …Read More