CRISPR people : the science and ethics of editing humans / Henry T. Greely.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-369) and index.

Just what did He Jiankui do? -- Human germline genome editing : what is it? -- CRISPR : what is it, why is it important, and who will benefit from it? -- Ethics discussions of CRISPR'd babies before He -- The law of CRISPR'd babies before He -- The He experiment revealed -- The world reacts : and so does China -- Who knew what when? Revelations of pre-summit knowledge -- Assessing the He experiment -- Responses -- Is human germline genome editing inherently bad? -- Could human germline genome editing sometimes be bad? -- Just how useful is human germline genome editing? -- How to test human germline genome editing -- The big decisions : and how to make them.

"In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos -- as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely tells the fascinating story of this human experience and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention. The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first 'CRISPR'd' people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely considers the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from 'germline editing' that can be passed on from one generation to the next. He doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed." -- Back.