Nature strikes a decisive blow against human hubris.
The ability of CRISPR gene-editing technology to safely modify human embryos has been cast into doubt after several recent papers described massive disruptions to DNA in embryos subjected to editing.
Each of the three papers, published this month without peer review on the preprint server bioRxiv, intended to edit only a single gene. But results showed large-scale, unintended DNA deletions and rearrangements in the areas surrounding the targeted sequence. . . .
“There’s no sugarcoating this,” Fyodor Urnov, a geneticist and CRISPR researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the research, tells OneZero. “This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.”
A Cold Eye 