The UK Favors Genetic Modification

The UK has become the first country to legalize genetic modification of human embryos.
Today the United Kingdom became the first country in the world to authorise a licence for a gene editing research technique on human embryos. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) received an application from the Francis Crick Institute, asking to apply gene editing techniques on human embryos. Today they were granted a licence to do just that.
The licence allows the researchers from the Francis Crick Institute in London “to edit the genomes of human embryos using a technique known as CRISPR–Cas9, a powerful tool that allows researchers to snip out defective genes and replace them with healthy ones with groundbreaking accuracy”, describes Aamna Mohdin in the article she wrote for qz.com.
Together with her team, Dr Kathy Niakan, the group leader at Crick, “will look at the first seven days of a fertilized egg’s development (from a single cell to around 250 cells).” (www.crick.ac.uk) The information learned from the research will help scientists understand how a healthy human embryo develops in more detail. The researchers also hope that the knowledge they gain  will improve the embryonic development after in vitro fertilisation. It might also be helpful for infertility treatments.
The gene editing technique CRISPR–Cas9 was first published by Chinese scientists in April last year, a team led by Junjiu Huang of Yat-sen University in China. It was already controversial then. The team had however conducted their work on damaged human embryos that never had a chance of developing into humans. The criticism from fellow scientists was that further animal studies and tests were needed before such methods could be applied to humans. Their reasons were that the “risk of unpredictable human mutations and scarier developments in human evolution such as eugenic programs.” (A. Pasick & A. Rathi for qz.com)
Somehow this breaking paper went relatively unnoticed. It was published in the online journal “Protein and Cell” The world renowned journal “Science and Nature” refused to publish the research due to ethical concerns. Nature’s News online highlighted the fact that whilst carrying out their research, Huang’s team ran into several obstacles which would prevent them from using their techniques in medical applications. The stem cell biologist George Daley at Harvard Medical School stated: “Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes.”
The positive side of this research would be the ability to remove faulty genes and therefore prevent terrible diseases. However, this is also countered through the argument that “because the genetic changes to embryos, known as germline modification, are heritable, they could have an unpredictable effect on future generations.” (nature.com)
What is the technique and what are the obstacles?
All of our cells – the building blocks of our bodies – contain a copy of our DNA, a unique genetic code. This code contains all the information we needed to grow from a fertilised egg to the person we are now and will become. Genetic disorders are illnesses that come from a mutation of a gene in their DNA. In other words that gene does not contain the correct information anymore.
“The technique used by Huang’s team involves injecting embryos with the enzyme complex CRISPR/Cas9, which binds and splices DNA at specific locations.” (nature.com) The enzyme complex can target a damaged gene, which can be replaced or repaired by a new molecule. This molecule is artificially introduced at the same time as the enzymes.
Huang and his team attempted to replace a gene in a single cell fertilized human embryo, using the method described above. The modified cell would then start splitting, replicating the new gene to all of the new cells. Hence the embryo would evolve healthy.
The hurdles that Huang and his team encountered are quite severe. Initially 86 embryos were injected with the enzyme complex and 71 survived. Out of the 71 embryos, 54 were tested. These tests showed that only 28 were successfully spliced and only a few of those had the new healthy gene replaced. Huang said: “If you want to do it in normal embryos, you need to be close to 100%. That’s why we stopped. We still think it’s too immature.”
The second obstacle was the side effect of unintentional other mutations. This is extremely worrying as these mutations could create new huge problems in themselves, such as other serious illnesses.
Huang and his team are working on solving these problems whilst their work continues to spark doubt and controversy. The biggest worry according to Lanphier, the president of Sangamo BioSciences in California is: “It underlines what we said before: we need to pause this research and make sure we have a broad based discussion about which direction we’re going here.” He worries that more and more scientists will experiment with this method, stating: “The ubiquitous access to and simplicity of creating CRISPRs creates opportunities for scientists in any part of the world to do any kind of experiments they want.”