In­censed by Chi­na CRISPR scan­dal, US con­sor­tium am­pli­fy glob­al call to sus­pend hu­man em­bryo edit­ing

In­spired by his bi­ol­o­gist broth­er, Al­dous Hux­ley laid out his dystopi­an vi­sion — re­plete with ge­net­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied cit­i­zens strat­i­fied by an in­tel­li­gence-based so­cial hi­er­ar­chy — in his 1932 book Brave New World. The emer­gence of mi­to­chon­dr­i­al re­place­ment ther­a­py or ‘three-par­ent IVF’ and one rogue Chi­nese sci­en­tist lat­er, fears that un­bri­dled hu­man em­bryo edit­ing could be dan­ger­ous from a sci­en­tif­ic, eth­i­cal, and so­ci­etal per­spec­tive have reignit­ed. On Wednes­day, a con­sor­tium of sci­en­tists, bioethi­cists, and biotech ex­ec­u­tives wrote to US HHS sec­re­tary Alex Azar, call­ing for a col­lab­o­ra­tion on a bind­ing glob­al mora­to­ri­um on hu­man clin­i­cal germline ex­per­i­men­ta­tion.

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