Five myths about gene editing
CRISPR’s breakthrough made headlines. But are we ready to engineer designer babies?
Gene editing made great strides this month when scientists reported success using a technique called CRISPR — Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats — to correct a serious, disease-causing mutation in human embryos. Researchers fixed a mutation that leads to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a relatively common inherited disease of the heart muscle that affects about 1 in 500 people. The public response was wildly enthusiastic. But any new technology can spur confusion and hyperbole, and this one is no exception. Here are five myths about what CRISPR can and can’t do…
