Human Germ-Line Interventions: The French Legal Framework

Abstract

CRISPR Cas9 technique has questioned worldwide its implementation with regards to the existing ethical and legal frameworks. In France, strong debates have occurred in several arenas from professionals to ethicists and lawyers as well as politicians. If all of them acknowledge the scientific progress brought by the discovery of these “molecular scissors” and their abilities to constitute a new pathway for the treatment of genetic diseases in the future, they all agree on the need for an agenda setting in order to evaluate the capacity of the technique to reach the clinic embedded in an agreed ethical and legal framework. The main argument for using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat) Cas9 with caution was based on the legal impossibility to modify the genome of a human being to be transmitted to the next generation. Germ line editing can be used in the future for treating somatic diseases (in one single person) or on embryos or gametes. The main difference between the two approaches is constituted by the level of the intervention. In the first approach, the therapy will only be used for one person targeting its own cells which can be legally qualified as a human intervention. In the second case, the rationale is to modify one DNA sequence (and/or to replace it) in germ-line. In that case the modification will be transmitted to future generation. From a legal perspective the emergence of CRISPR Cas9 interrogates its qualification and its legal regime. In order to classify this innovation among the legal categories already adopted in the French legal framework, we must investigate the current legal principles stated in the French laws and then the criteria to be applied to this new kind of gene intervention.