Overheard a scientist at a coffee shop in Cambridge say 'the ethics board is a speed bump, not a stop sign' about human germline trials.

I was grabbing a coffee yesterday and the table next to me was two researchers talking shop. One said that line about the ethics board being a 'speed bump' for a project aiming to edit embryos for a specific heart condition. It made me realize how fast this is moving without much public talk. Shouldn't we have a real, loud debate before someone just goes for it?

3 comments

3 Comments

simon_coleman22d ago

Forget the ethics board for a second. The real speed bump might be the science itself, because we still don't fully understand how changing one gene affects the whole system. What if fixing that heart condition accidentally makes the brain more prone to something else decades later? That's a gamble on a whole human life, not just a project deadline. How do we even set rules for a risk that might not show up for fifty years?

the_simon22d ago

But isn't that still an ethics problem?

robin_lee18d ago

That story about the Cambridge coffee shop is wild. It reminds me of a friend who worked in a lab studying fruit fly genes. They found a fix for one issue that made the flies live longer, but it also made them really bad at finding food. It's like @the_simon was getting at, the side effects are the real problem. We can't see the full picture yet, so how can we be sure about changing human genes forever? What if the fix works but the person needs a special diet for life that we don't know about yet?