Gene edited baby

In November 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui shocked the world when he announced that he had deliberately tweaked the genes of two embryos to make them resistant to the AIDS virus, HIV.

He did that using CRISPR gene editing, an ingenious system that allows little molecular scissors to snip bits of DNA. Molecular scissors aren’t new — scientists have been using them to cut DNA since the 1970s — but CRISPR is considered a snip above because its little scissors are so flexible, it’s infinitely easier to target specific DNA sequences.

He’s “goal was to make the gene inoperative and thus deprive HIV of that gateway for infection,” Stanford University bioethicist Henry T. Greely writes in his new book, “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.” “Two edited embryos, of nonidentical twin sisters, were transferred into their mother’s uterus sometime in late March or early April 2018. Sometime in October, somewhere in China, they were born.”

The birth of those twins marked the first time scientists had tinkered with the human genome to pass some trait along to the next generation. In a very real sense (and this was the problem), He and his team were using CRISPR to short-circuit more than a billion years of evolution. They had created CRISPR babies, unleashing fears that the next inevitable step would be designer babies.............

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/me...t-evolution-what-now/ar-AAKexi9?ocid=msedgntp