Dr. Craig Sweet’s fertility clinic in Fort Myers, Florida, has resulted in nearly 3,000 pregnancies.

The pregnancies, he said, have been the upside to his 28 years in the business of helping patients fulfill their dreams of having babies.

But there’s a downside: Hundreds of embryos sit in a frozen state of limbo, abandoned in the center’s storage tanks by in vitro fertilization patients who once sought the help of Sweet’s team in their journey to become parents, then walked away.

“We were not prepared for any of this,” Sweet said.

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We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm, eggs or embryos) to make genetically modified children.

By ‘global moratorium’, we do not mean a permanent ban. Rather, we call for the establishment of an international framework in which nations, while retaining the right to make their own decisions, voluntarily commit to not approve any use of clinical germline editing unless certain conditions are met.

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An influential committee of the World Health Organization said on Tuesday that it would be “irresponsible” to try to create babies from gene-edited human embryos. The panel called for an international registry to track all research into editing the human genome.

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What appeared to be a cyst in a healthy fetus turned out to be an unformed twin “absorbed” early in pregnancy, connected by a second umbilical cord and still growing.

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The World Health Organization established a new committee to set guidelines for scientists editing human DNA, just months after the controversial births of the world’s first gene-edited babies in China.

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New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.

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Officials at Stanford University have opened an investigation into what several high-profile faculty members knew about a Chinese effort to create gene-edited babies led by a onetime researcher at the California school, He Jiankui.

The investigation, according to people familiar with it, aims to understand what liabilities or risks Stanford may have in connection with the controversial medical experiment, which led last year to the birth of two girls whose genomes had been altered with a molecular tool called CRISPR to render them immune to HIV.

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A preliminary investigation by Guangdong Province in China of He Jiankui, the scientist who created the world’s first gene-edited babies, found that “He had intentionally dodged supervision, raised funds and organized researchers on his own to carry out the human embryo gene-editing intended for reproduction, which is explicitly banned by relevant regulations.”

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Some U.S. researchers knew of a Chinese scientist’s intentions to implant edited embryos but were unable to stop him. Now scientific institutions are trying to devise global safeguards.

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Chinese researchers have cloned five gene-edited monkeys with a host of genetic disease symptoms, according to two scientific papers published today.

The researchers say they want to use the gene-edited macaques for biomedical research; basically, they hope that engineering sick primates will reduce the total number of macaques used in research around the world. But their experiment is a minefield of ethical quandaries—and makes you wonder whether the potential benefits to science are enough to warrant all of the harm to these monkeys.

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