You probably in no soon years be sure if its really human sitting next to you. As human embryos have been genetically modified for the first time ever, which could soon lead to the creation of designer babies.
Leading American scientists have secretly carried out extensive work into altering the DNA of human embryos.
The technique would revolutionise health care, allowing scientists to prevent genetically inherited diseases and significantly lessening the chances of others being passed down.
But the treatment has sparked controversy, with critics saying that tampering with the essence of human code is 'dangerous and ethically unacceptable'.
The research is believed to have been carried out on ovary cells taken from a woman with inherited ovarian cancer to investigate the possibility of eventually using gene-editing to produce IVF embryos that are free of the disease.
The Independent reports that researchers at Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used the Crispr gene-editing technique on human ovarian tissue cultured in the lab to attempt to correct the defective BRAC1 gene which results in inherited breast and ovarian cancer.
The work was carried out last year by Luhan Yang, a researcher working in the lab of the respected Harvard geneticist George Church.
Professor Church insisted that the work was purely experimental and there was no intention of fertilising any eggs or transplanting them into a woman.
He said: 'The experiments were not in human beings. They were in cells in culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment