"CRISPR/Cas9 is a gene editing technology that's revolutionizing science at a breathtaking pace.

One of its most exciting, taboo, and controversial applications is tweaking the genes of eggs, sperm, or early embryos to alter a human life. This could one day mean the ability to create smarter or more athletic humans (yes, "designer babies"), but also the chance to knock out disease-causing genetic mutations that parents pass on to their children. We're talking about eliminating mutations linked to diseases like breast and ovarian cancers or cystic fibrosis.

Today, a team of scientists report that they have made major progress toward proving the latter is possible.

In a paper published in the prestigious journal Nature, a team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University describes how it used CRISPR/Cas9 to correct a genetic mutation that's linked to a heart disorder called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy in human embryos. And they did it without creating errors that have plagued previous attempts to edit human embryos with CRISPR.

To be clear, the new work from OHSU was a basic science experiment - the point was to test a concept, and the embryos used were never implanted into a woman's uterus.

But they were ultimately able to show that CRISPR/Cas9 could actually be used to cut the mutant gene sequence, prompt the embryos to repair the DNA with healthy copies of the gene, and eliminate the disease-causing mutation altogether. "

vox


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"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill