QnAs with Alta Charo and George Church

Abstract

When the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine released a long-awaited report on human genome editing in February 2017, it was met with the media attention that befits a signal moment in science policy. Among a raft of measured recommendations, the report notes that heritable modifications to human DNA could be allowed in the future under strict regulatory oversight and solely for the purpose of treating serious diseases for which people have no recourse to reasonable alternatives (1). The result of year-long deliberations by an international committee of experts in science, law, and bioethics, the report’s guidelines were largely unsurprising to many in the scientific community, given the intense scientific ferment in the field of genome editing and the handful of ongoing clinical trials involving nonheritable changes to the human genome. But some scholars strenuously objected to the recommendation on heritable genome editing, raising the specter of a future in which the fabric of society is unstitched by unequal access and genetic discrimination. Yet the report brims with cautionary language that counsels against the use of heritable editing except as a last resort, and only when such interventions are proven to be safe, when regulatory agencies are adequately equipped to oversee them, and when the tide of public opinion turns in their favor. Proving the need for such an abundance of caution, preliminary reports on editing mutations in viable human embryos grown in the laboratory suggest that the technique is far from ready for the clinic. PNAS asked Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who cochaired the committee behind the report, and George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, who works at the forefront of genome editing, to share their thoughts on the recommendations. George Church. Image courtesy …