Human embryo genetic modification should be allowed: research group

• comments
• 
• 

The Hinxton Group, a global group of stem cell researchers, bioethicists and policy experts who met in Britain last week are pushing for human embryo genetic modification to be allowed, FOX News reports. The group issued a statement saying that this move is "essential" and will be of "tremendous value" to the research.

The Hinxton Group was founded to "explore the ethical and policy challenges of transnational scientific collaboration raised by variations in national regulations governing embryo research and stem cell science."

According to the Hinxton Group, gene-editing research "will continue to progress rapidly, and there is and will be pressure to make decisions scientifically and for funding, publishing and governance purposes."

Hinxton Group, however, is opposed to having genetically modified human babies born. They said in a statement: "We acknowledge that when all safety, efficacy and governance needs are met, there may be morally acceptable uses of this technology in human reproduction, though further substantial discussion and debate will be required."

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been funding biomedical research for years, but they oppose the use of money for gene-editing technologies in human embryos, and therefore does not provide any monetary support for such causes.

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in April: "The concept of altering the human germline in embryos for clinical purposes has been debated over many years from many different perspectives, and has been viewed almost universally as a line that should not be crossed." Collins played a a key role in the Human Genome Project, which was launched in 1990.

Dr. Peter Mills of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics agreed with the NIH, and told BBC: "We have seen these uses coming over the horizon, but we need to decide whether we're going to invite them in when they reach our doorstep."

Robin Lovell-Badge, a member of the Hinxton Group steering committee and head of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics at the Francis Crick Institute in Britain explained: "Genome-editing techniques could be used to ask how cell types are specified in the early embryo and the nature and importance of the genes involved."

He further argued that "Understanding gained could lead to improvements in IVF (in vitro fertilization) and reduced implantation failure, using treatments that do not involve genome editing."

John Sulston, who led the Human Genome Project, and is the winner of the 2002 Nobel prize in Medicine and former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, spoke with the Academy of Achievement in 2004 about his thoughts on a scientist's ethical responsibility.

"We need to find a new way of conducting ethics. But I don't think this can be done just on the level of the individual scientist. After all, we're all people. We get hired to do this or that. We, after all, owe a duty of delivery to our bosses, our funders. So you cannot leave it to the individual to decide whether or not an application is ethical. This must be done in a societal way, a democratic way. What it means in practice is that we should have good, constantly evolving, thought-out regulations about how we handle biological products," said Sulston.