A lab experiment aimed at fixing defective DNA in human embryos shows what can go wrong with this type of gene editing and why leading scientists say it's too unsafe to try. In more than half of the cases, the editing caused unintended changes, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks of it.
Columbia University researchers describe their work Thursday in the journal Cell. They used CRISPR-cas9, the same chemical tool that a Chinese scientist used on embryos in 2018 to help make the world's first gene-edited babies, which landed him in prison and drew international scorn.
"If our results had been known two years ago, I doubt that anyone would have gone ahead" and tried it on embryos intended for pregnancy, said biologist Dieter Egli, who led the study. Surprisingly, it didn't work in any of the cells from embryos edited at fertilization. It only worked in three of the 45 cells from embryos edited at the later stage.
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