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Author Archive: Jon Holmlund
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 …
07/26/2018
PAS and “plain old” suicide
Last week, the folks from the Manhattan Declaration (whose key concern is freedom of religion) sent an email with a series of links—perhaps expanding their remit a smidge—one of which dealt with doctor-assisted suicide. “Doctor-assisted suicide is contagious,” it said, along with this: “Doctor-assisted suicide increases overall suicide rates among the non-terminally ill everywhere it’s …
07/19/2018
Britain’s experts on gene-edited babies
Some of the cable news shows ran segments on the report released this week by Britain’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, “Genome editing and human reproduction: social and ethical issues.” Full disclosure: I have not yet read the full report, only the short summaries (all of which are available for free download at the link here). …
07/13/2018
Raiding the CRISPR
A couple of gene-editing news items from this week’s science literature: First, Nature reports that a group in my “back yard,” at the University of California San Diego, has tested gene editing using the CRISPR approach in mice. Recall that CRISPR is an acronym for a particular molecular mechanism, first discovered in bacteria, that is …
That’s only a slight paraphrase of a news feature article this week in Nature. The clearly-written article is devoid of scientific jargon, with helpful illustrations, open-access online, and readily accessible to the non-specialist. Check it out. Key points include: Scientists who do not find it ethically unacceptable to create and destroy human embryos solely for …
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