Increasingly, moral barriers against genetic engineering are disappearing.
“As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, a team led by Columbia University geneticist Dieter Egli used a technique called base editing, essentially editing a single strand of DNA, to edit two genomic sites.
“The goal wasn’t to establish promising new therapeutic or medical treatments, as the scientists noted in their paper. Instead, they attempted to demonstrate that base editing was a viable way of editing sequences of DNA in embryos without risking the damage earlier attempts involving CRISPR have caused.
“But as Scientific American reports, the latest research could lay the groundwork for more controversial work, despite the embryos not being carried to term, with pioneering genome‑editing researcher and Alexis Komor, who helped develop CRISPR, telling the publication that the ‘cat’s out of the bag.’”
Correction, the catgirl’s out of the bag.
“Komor argued that without any strict regulatory oversight in the US, Egli and his colleagues may have broken an existing ‘gentleman’s agreement,’ in the kind of research that ‘kind of opens the floodgates.’”
Obviously this means we will get closer to a flood of genetically engineered catgirls suitable for domestic adoption.
A little mood music:
