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CRISPR People

The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans

Author Henry T. Greely
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Paperback
$19.95 US
The MIT Press
On sale Mar 01, 2022 | 400 Pages | 9780262543880
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What does the birth of babies whose embryos had gone through genome editing mean--for science and for all of us?

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.
 
The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.
 
Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.
Introduction ix
Part I: Background 1
1 Just What Did He Jiankui Do? 3
2 Human Germline Genome Editing— What Is It? 23
3 CRISPR— What Is It, Why Is It Important, and Who Will Benefit
from It? 33
4 Ethics Discussions of CRISPR’d Babies before He 49
5 The Law of CRISPR’d Babies before He 75
Part II: The Revelation and Its Aftermath 89
6 The He Experiment Revealed 91
7 The World Reacts— And So Does China 109
8 Who Knew What When? Revelations of Pre- Summit
Knowledge 121
Part III: Assessing and Responding to the He Experiment 145
9 Assessing the He Experiment 147
10 Responses 173
Part IV: Human Germline Genome Editing Generally— Now
What? 201
11 Is Human Germline Genome Editing Inherently Bad? 203
12 Could Human Germline Genome Editing Sometimes
Be Bad? 217
13 Just How Useful Is Human Germline Genome Editing? 225
14 How to Test Human Germline Genome Editing 247
15 The Big Decisions— And How to Make Them 269
Conclusion 293
Acknowledgments 295
Notes 299
Index 371
Henry T. Greely is Professor of Law, Professor by Courtesy of Genetics, and Director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, where he also chairs the Steering Committee of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and directs the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society.
Henry T. Greely View titles by Henry T. Greely

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What does the birth of babies whose embryos had gone through genome editing mean--for science and for all of us?

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.
 
The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.
 
Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix
Part I: Background 1
1 Just What Did He Jiankui Do? 3
2 Human Germline Genome Editing— What Is It? 23
3 CRISPR— What Is It, Why Is It Important, and Who Will Benefit
from It? 33
4 Ethics Discussions of CRISPR’d Babies before He 49
5 The Law of CRISPR’d Babies before He 75
Part II: The Revelation and Its Aftermath 89
6 The He Experiment Revealed 91
7 The World Reacts— And So Does China 109
8 Who Knew What When? Revelations of Pre- Summit
Knowledge 121
Part III: Assessing and Responding to the He Experiment 145
9 Assessing the He Experiment 147
10 Responses 173
Part IV: Human Germline Genome Editing Generally— Now
What? 201
11 Is Human Germline Genome Editing Inherently Bad? 203
12 Could Human Germline Genome Editing Sometimes
Be Bad? 217
13 Just How Useful Is Human Germline Genome Editing? 225
14 How to Test Human Germline Genome Editing 247
15 The Big Decisions— And How to Make Them 269
Conclusion 293
Acknowledgments 295
Notes 299
Index 371

Author

Henry T. Greely is Professor of Law, Professor by Courtesy of Genetics, and Director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, where he also chairs the Steering Committee of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and directs the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society.
Henry T. Greely View titles by Henry T. Greely

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In November 2018, the scientific community was shaken to its core and the world at large scandalized by the birth of twin girls in China—babies whose DNA had been edited when they were embryos. They were the first “CRISPR’d” people ever born, an acronym standing for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, a powerful gene

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