Special Feature
CRISPR/CAS FACES THE BIOETHICS SPOTLIGHT
The speed and efficiency of the CRISPR/Cas system is creating not only experimental opportunities but also ethical challenges. Jeffrey Perkel looks at how researchers are approaching this powerful genome editing technology.
Image credit: KC Roeyer
Three years ago, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier launched a molecular biology revolution by
unraveling the CRISPR/Cas system. Their seminal paper, published in June 2012 and cited over 900 times accord- ing to Google Scholar, describes a mechanism by which the Cas9 enzyme can cleave any segment of DNA, guided by a short RNA molecule complementary to the sequence of interest. Scientists quickly took note and have since exploited the finding to rewrite the genomes of cultured cells and model organisms, tweak gene expression pro- grams, and drive drug development and disease etiology research.
The interesting thing is that, for all the hoopla surround-
ing CRISPR/Cas9 at the moment, the technique really doesn’t do much that researchers couldn’t have done be- fore using other technologies. What makes CRISPR/Cas unique is that it is far more accessible and easy to imple- ment. Other nuclease-based genome editing technolo- gies such as zinc finger nucleases and TALENs are more complex systems with protein-based recognition domains. With the CRISPR/Cas9 system, all that is required is the widely available Cas9 enzyme and an appropriate guide RNA for targeting.
The problem is, such simplicity cuts both ways. On the
plus side, essentially anybody with basic molecular biol- ogy expertise can use CRISPR for genome editing. On the
Vol. 58 | No. 5 | 2015
other hand, anybody can use the technology for almost any purpose.
“We’ve created CRISPR technologies that are easy
enough that people can impulsively do experiments that could have consequences—at a minimum, public relations consequences,” suggests Harvard University geneticist George Church, who studies CRISPR.
Ethics classes
Researchers are working to head off those consequences. In January, 18 researchers, clinicians, ethicists, and lawyers assembled in Napa, California, to discuss what should be done about the real possibility of CRISPR/Cas9 technology being used to modify the genomes of human embryos and germ cells—making heritable genetic changes. The con- sensus from the meeting, which was published March 19 in a perspective in the journal Science, calls on the scientific community to “strongly discourage” genomic modification of the human germ line (1). Edward Lanphier and Fyodor Urnov, CEO and senior scientist, respectively, at Sangamo BioSciences, and their colleagues independently called for a moratorium on human germline editing in a commentary published online March 12 in the journal Nature (2).
This is not the first time ethical debate over the use of CRISPR technology has emerged; last year researchers
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