The British government has legalized the procedure for interfering with the genome of the human embryo. Biologist Ilya Kolmanovsky tells the story of DNA experiments in China and the United States, and also explains why there is now no acute ethical problem in connection with genome editing. Indeed, this is a sensation: for the first time in history, the state allowed a specific group of scientists from the country's largest biomedical center, the Francis Crick Institute, to edit genes not in individual cells, but in whole human embryos. Thus, scientists were able to find out how accurately the tools for such a change work, and what consequences the editing leads to - however, only within the first 14 days of development; after that, the embryos must be destroyed.
This is a historic decision - especially because the UK has quite strict laws: any manipulation of human embryos without the permission of the Ministry of Health - receipt, any interference, storage, transfer, implantation - is criminalized.
86 Chinese embryos
In China, there are no such strict and detailed prohibitions. In the spring of 2015, scientists from Guangzhou University reported an attempt to alter the gene for a deadly inherited disease, beta thalassemia, in 86 unclaimed embryos from a reproductive health clinic. The attempt was so-so: some embryos stopped developing, some had replacements in places where they were not planned (a nightmare from a night dream of a futurologist), and only 12% had the desired replacement and normal development began - however, they were poured into the sink anyway before the expiration of 14 days, because even Chinese laws do not allow mothers to plant such embryos.
The Chinese work was accompanied by a scandal. A group of renowned scientists called for a moratorium on such experiments. According to critics, the method is too imprecise, and can lead to the birth of seriously ill people who, moreover, will pass on their properties to offspring. The Chinese countered: their publication ends with exactly this generalization (“the method is inaccurate and needs to be improved”), but it does not follow from it that experiments in the early stages of development are somehow harmful: on the contrary, they will bring this method to perfection. True, at the cost of thousands of ruined embryos.
However, if we really care about the rights of two-week-old embryos, for them the decision of the British government is good news. The fact is that today parents, who have a high chance of passing on a gene of a dangerous disease to their offspring, resort to the method of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, developed 30 years ago in Chicago by immigrants from the USSR, doctors Verlinsky and Kuliev. Several embryos begin "in a test tube", their development begins, and in the first days one cell is taken from each for study. Gene analysis allows you to understand which embryos are healthy - it is them that are implanted in mothers. The rest are destroyed; in some countries it is allowed to destroy not even the sick, but only the carriers of the "bad" gene - in order to save them themselves from a similar reproductive hassle in adulthood. Actually, of these "refuseniks" Chinese scientists, for example,and took 86 objects for experiments.
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When the method of editing human genes in embryos is perfected, it will no longer be necessary to pour the "wrong" embryos into the shell, since you can simply edit them before replanting. This is a technique called CRISPR-Cas9; it was first used nine years ago to edit genes in dairy fermenting bacteria. Each time the CRISPR-Cas9 method was applied to a new object (crops, fish, rats, pigs, macaques), it took several months to get a good result; biologist Alexander Panchin (author of the popular science book "The Sum of Biotechnology") describes the rapid progress of this technique, which over the past year has resulted in a manifold increase in its accuracy.
Private American Experiments
There are countries (for example, the USA) where the law does not directly regulate the work with early embryos; and licensing (respectively, and bans) arises only when public money is spent. There are institutions in the States that receive mostly private funding. For example, Shukhrat Mitalipov at Oregon Health and Science University manages two laboratories: in the one where there is no state funding, he was able two years ago for the first time in history to "clone a person", that is, to transplant foreign somatic nuclei into ready-made embryonic cells (having previously thrown out the original nucleus from there) and see the first stages of the development of clones, and then destroy them; this cannot be done at public expense, since embryos cannot be destroyed. And in 2015, Shukhrat Mitalipov began working in China, where the legislative burden is even lower. So it is likelythat the first successfully edited embryos will appear in private laboratories - and quite soon.
The UK is a country that is trying to avoid gray areas in biotechnology legislation, so it is quickly adjusting it to the current situation. So, in 2015, the parliament - for the first time in the world - legalized the procedure for obtaining children from three parents, which was developed by the same Shukhrat Mitalipov; in the UK, about 150 families a year will be able to receive such treatment free of charge (these families will receive eggs from women, and replace the nucleus in donor eggs with a nucleus from the main mother, who has hereditary defects in the egg cell; at the same time, the child will receive some amount of DNA from her secondary mom).
The new decision of the British government legitimizes the situation exactly within the safe corridor: now you can try to do like the Chinese, that is, improve the methodology in the early days of development, and at the expense of the state. This is important because public funding is much larger than private funding, which means that progress will go quickly.
The world reacted to this news with another wave of panic over the onset of the eugenics age: since we can edit the genes, then we will quickly move on to creating the army of Oorfene Deuce. But this is far from it: we do not know the genes for law-abidingness and low intelligence. But we know the genes of many dangerous diseases, and we can clean out such genes - and stop their spread in the population. True, there are also difficulties - for example, genes that determine minor features; such as hearing loss. Community organizations of the deaf consider the desire to give all people perfect hearing as a eugenic approach: some deaf consider the language of the deaf as a special culture that is threatened with extinction. And there is also a hypothesis that the genes of some diseases cripple or kill people when they receive two copies of such a gene (from both parents), but may carry some benefits.when present in only one copy; there is a suggestion that this is the case with the Tay-Sachs idiocy gene - one copy means high intelligence. Let's remove the gene from the population - who knows, maybe geniuses will be born less often.
The main reason for the restraining laws is concerns about inaccurate editing and uncertainty of results; an attempt to avoid a situation where victims of an imprecise method may be born. In the meantime, a license from the British Ministry of Health gave biologists the opportunity to bring the method to perfection. It may only be a matter of a few years of work. And then the discussion will enter a new round: if we can change genes in human embryos with high accuracy and receive stable development, the question of replanting them will certainly arise - and by that time the conservatives will have one less argument.
Ilya Kolmanovsky