By Jon Holmlund A brief recap of reasons why we should not pursue heritable human gene editing: It seems unlikely that risks to immediately-treated generations can be predicted with the accuracy we currently and reasonably expect from human subject research and medical practice. Risks to later generations, that is, to the descendants of edited people, …
Continue reading "Summarizing ethical issues with heritable human gene editing"
02/08/2019
Human organ harvest
By Jon Holmlund The ethical practice of human organ transplantation entails consent from a donor to donate an organ while still living (e.g., one of the donor’s two kidneys), or after dying (e.g., the heart). In the latter case, it is still generally accepted that the donor must be dead first, and that the harvesting …
By Jon Holmlund Passing along word that the National Academies of Medicine and Science are planning an international commission on human gene editing, the editorial board of the New York Times has issued a welcome call to make the public discussion of the issues as broad as possible. Read the whole thing, but this key …
Continue reading "Gene-editing public discussions: looking ahead"
01/27/2019
Revisiting the definition of death
By Jon Holmlund The Hastings Center shows Christmas Day 2018 as the date of publication of its report, “Defining Death: Organ Transplantation and the Fifty-Year Legacy of the Harvard Report on Brain Death,” arising from a 2018 conference of the same title at Harvard Medical School. The full contents are freely available at the link …
12/21/2018
Gene-Edited Animals as Trailblazers
By Jon Holmlund The Chinese researcher who says he edited the genes of two recently-born twin girls is named He. He’s not a deity, that’s just his name. (I don’t think it’s pronounced with a long “e,” by the way.) His motivation appears to have been to be the first, to show that He …
12/13/2018
“The Babies are the Experiment”
By Jon Holmlund The Thursday, Dec 13 edition of the Wall Street Journal carries this headline: “Doubts Arise Over Gene-Editing Claim.” The work behind the recent report that the world’s first two gene-edited babies had been born has been publicly discussed, but the details have not yet been published for full scientific review. Apparently …
12/06/2018
Human Embryos as Raw Materials
By Jon Holmlund This past Tuesday, the Presidential Symposium at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) addressed human gene editing. The speakers included NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who spoke about somatic gene editing. That’s the attempt to edit disease-causing genes in existing, fully formed individuals who have the …
11/29/2018
The Genie is Out of the Bottle
By Jon Holmlund Much has already been written and said—mostly in condemnation–about this week’s announcement of the birth of the first gene-edited baby (or, better, babies—there are twins). A gene was altered in embryos created through in vitro fertilization, and then the embryos were transferred to their mother, who carried them to term and, …
11/15/2018
A Bit More on “The Children We Want”
By Jon Holmlund The Wall Street Journal recently asked “Is it ethical to choose your baby’s eye color?” This can’t be predicted precisely, yet, because the inheritance involves several genes, but in principle it’s at least possible to play the odds by trying to predict the probability of eye color. The article in question …
08/10/2018
Mumbling orphans—a bit more
Mark McQuain has raised the persistent, vexing issue of the pricing of drugs for rare diseases—in the case at hand, Sarepta’s eteplirsen (Exondys 51) for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, the disease over which the late comedian Jerry Lewis lost sleep every Labor Day weekend for years. Mark provided an excellent summary (he calls it “crude,” but …
Bioethics TV