Human germ line editing-roles and responsibilities.

Abstract

The mere idea of altering the human germ line has caused excitement as well as fears since decades. The good and, in particular, the dubious motives for such interventions and the anticipated troublesome outcomes have been a recurring theme in literature, art, movies. Until recently, these were merely science fiction scenarios. Yet, considerations about the impact of potential future alteration of the human germ line played a prominent role already in debates ahead of the first clinical trials with somatic gene therapy in 1985 (Anderson, 1985; Fletcher, 1985). Now, three decades later, human germ line modification has become a scientific reality with the experiment on CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in human-tripronuclear-zygotes by Liang et al., as published in this journal (Liang et al., 2015).