The long and bumpy road to CRISPR

A Crack in Creation:The New Power to Control Evolution

I've read the same book than Diane Coyle this summer. If you want a clear understanding of what's going on in genomic editing, it should be your first choice. A crack in creation is a description and analysis by Jeniffer Doudna the main researcher on the topic. For those that are excited by genome editingit is good to read this statement:

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. The fact that gene editing might be able to reverse the course of a disease—permanently—by targeting its underlying genetic cause is thrilling enough. But even more so is the fact that CRISPR can be retooled to target new sequences of DNA and, hence, new diseases. Given CRISPR’s tremendous potential, I’ve grown accustomed over the past several years to being approached by established pharmaceutical companies asking for my help in learning about the CRISPR technology and about how it might be deployed in the quest for new therapeutics.
But therapeutic gene editing is still in its infancy—indeed, clinical trials have only just begun—and there are still big questions about how things will progress from here. The decades-long struggle to make good on the promise of gene therapy should serve as a reminder that medical advances are almost always more complicated than they might seem. For CRISPR, too, the road leading from the lab to the clinic will be long and bumpy.
Deciding what types of cells to target is one of the many dilemmas confronting researchers—should they edit somatic cells (from the Greek soma, for “body”) or germ cells (from the Latin germen, for “bud” or “sprout”)? The distinction between these two classes of cells cuts to the heart of one of the most heated and vital debates in the world of medicine today.
Germ cells are any cells whose genome can be inherited by subsequent generations, and thus they make up the germline of the organism—the stream of genetic material that is passed from one generation to the next. While eggs and sperm are the most obvious germ cells in humans, the germline also encompasses the progenitors of these mature sex cells as well as stem cells from the very early stages of the developing human embryo.
Somatic cells are virtually all the other cells in an organism: heart, muscle, brain, skin, liver—any cell whose DNA cannot be transmitted to offspring.

Therefore, caution is required and ethical implications are huge as I've said before.
Highly recommended.

The long and bumpy road to CRISPR (3)

 CRISPR People. The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans

A book on the ethics of CRISPR, without a clear prescription, only a review of He horrendous experiment and a personal view of the current situation.

This has been a cautionary tale about scienceand scientists. People can overreach. He Jiankui, driven as far as I can tell by what Macbeth called “vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself,”1 and aided by a serious lack of scruples, behaved terribly. He put three lives at needless and reckless risk (and tried to do the same to more). The story is also a cautionary tale for Science. He Jiankui damaged Science by reinforcing the Victor Frankenstein image—the mad, uncontrolled scientist. Most scientists, and hence most science, are much more rule bound, constrained by the needs of getting and keeping jobs, tenure, and most importantly grants, as well as wrapped, in most countries, in many bureaucratic threads of control. But He happened, and Science needs both to act to minimize the harm he has caused and to be seen to be doing so.

A global consensus is a chimera. Seven and a half billion people are not going to agree on this issue—nor will the fraction of those who understand it. Neither will the roughly 200 countries of the world, at least at anything other than a lowest common denominator. Not all countries have agreed to various nuclear weapons or climate change treaties in spite of the apparently obvious need for them. If somehow something close to unanimity were achieved, it would probably be at the cost of precision. Thus, the Council of Europe enacted a convention that banned human cloning, but effectively left open the then-hot question whether it covered just reproductive cloning or “research cloning” (of human embryos for only ex vivo use) by not defining a “human being.” It also left the implantation and enforcement of such a ban up to the member nations, some of whom were probably happy, for political reasons, to sign it but will have little interest in enforcing it. 

And this is the controversial position of the author:

 One might argue that human germline genome changes are irreversible, or less reversible, than some other interventions. But is that true? A mistaken genome change could presumably be reedited, in a living person or in that person’s germline (or embryos), to reverse the error. Or it could be selected against in the individual’s offspring, through PGD or otherwise. It could be too late to avoid harm to the edited person, but that mistake will not have to pass on from generation to generation. Human germline genome editing does raise important questions about safety, coercion, equity, diversity, and  enhancement. These are not unique to editing the human germline genome. They also apply to somatic cell DNA editing, to new drugs, to smartphones, to climate change, and to many other changes from technologies. Questions about reversibility also apply; the social effects of cell phones are probably less reversible than genome edits. The fact that a technological change is in “the human germline genome” should have no special ethical weight.

Really? Security in CRISPR is not unique???

The long and bumpy road to CRISPR (2)

 Editing Humanity. The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing

In 2017 I wrote a post about the book by Jennifer Doudna, A Crack in Creation, now Kevin Davies, the editor of the CRISPR journal has published a new book on CRISPR. It is an effort to put all the information and details about CRISPR in one book. Therefore, if you want to now the whole story (or close to) this is the book to read. If you are interested in a general approach, then the Doudna book is better.

It is quite relevant the chapter that explains the role of Francis Mojica in CRISPR (chapter 3), and the chapter 18, on crossing the germline and what happened about the scandal of genome editing by JK.

“When science moves faster than moral understanding,” Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel wrote in 2004, “men and women struggle to articulate their own unease.” The genomic revolution has induced “a kind of moral vertigo.”49 That unease has been triggered numerous times before and after the genetic engineering revolution—the structure of the double helix, the solution of the genetic code, the recombinant DNA revolution, prenatal genetic diagnosis, embryonic stem cells, and the cloning of Dolly. “Test tube baby” was an epithet in many circles but five million IVF babies are an effective riposte to critics of assisted reproductive technology.

With CRISPR, history is repeating itself,

That's it, great book.

 

The long and bumpy road to CRISPR (4)

 The Genome Odyssey. Medical Mysteries and the Incredible Quest to Solve Them

The long and bumpy road to CRISPR (5)

 CRISPR: Genome Editing and Engineering And Related Issues

The long and bumpy road to CRISPR (3)

 Cut-and-Paste Genetics. A CRISPR Revolution