Posted on 06/28/2020 11:26:13 AM PDT by Marchmain
Joseph Meaney, PH.D., speaking Friday in an interview on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly, said that the experiment gone wrong was predictable, because science, as it emerges into new areas, makes a lot of mistakes.
WASHINGTON In the wake of a gene-editing experiment gone wrong, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center said that the Church must stand firm against the unborn being sacrificed on the altar of scientific research.
Mediums science publication OneZero reported last week that scientists in the United Kingdom recently conducted an experiment where they deleted a gene from human embryos using the CRISPR technique.
They later realized the edited embryos also contained significant unintended edits that could lead to birth defects or other major medical issues later in life. The embryos were subsequently destroyed.
Theres no sugarcoating this, Fyodor Urnov, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, told OneZero. This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.
Its really terrible, what theyre talking about, because gene editing for embryos, because its germline changes, meaning that if these children survive, their children, this will be passed on, its like changing the biology of the human being, the DNA of human beings, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
Gene editing experiments on embryos are subject to significant ethical oversight worldwide with the exception of Chinese researchers. The standard practice is to use “triploid” embryos that formed accidently with 3 sets of chromosomes rather than the usual 2 (1 father , 1 mother). Triploid embryos produce non-viable fetuses which die within hours of birth if they survive to term at all.
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