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More than 400 scientists, bioethicists, and historians from 20 countries on 6 continents have gathered this week in Washington, DC, for the Human Gene Editing Summit. The attendees are a veritable who's who of genome editing: Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard-the three discoverers of the CRISPR-Cas9 system's utility in gene editing-plus dozens of other big names in genome science. Cal Tech's David Baltimore along with the heads of the four national societies hosting the meeting (US National Academy of Sciences, US National Academy of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.'s Royal Society) provided opening remarks on Tuesday (December 1). And as I sat stage right in the NAS auditorium, I noticed the unmistakable rear profile of Harvard Medical School's George Church three rows in front of me. Church was scheduled to speak at a session later that afternoon about the application of CRISPR and other new precision gene editing techniques to the human germline-a hot-button topic since April, when a Chinese group published it had successfully modified the genomes of human embryos, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said it would not fund such research. Then in September, the U.S./U.K.-based Hinxton Group, an international consortium of scientists, policy experts, and bioethicists, said it supported the use of genetic editing in human embryos for limited applications in research and medicine.  

Horn removal through gene editing is a win-win both for the animal and for the farmer, says Muir, who did not take part in this research. "These findings show that you can take highly desirable genes from animals and move them to other members of their species," he told Popular Science. "One could achieve the same results with natural breeding, but gene editing greatly speeds up the process, reducing the time it takes to accomplish the goal from centuries to years."

Tweaking the human genome with current and future gene-editing tools could lead to sophisticated treatments and prevention strategies for disease. The promise of those applications is reason enough to move forward with such work in the lab and clinic, albeit cautiously, the dozen scientists and bioethicists who organized the International Summit on Human Gene Editing said today after three days of deliberation and presentations in Washington, D.C.

The uproar over the new ease and precision with which scientists can manipulate the DNA of living things has centered largely on the complicated prospect of editing human embryos. But with the federal government's approval last week of a fast-growing salmon as the first genetically altered animal Americans can eat, a menagerie of gene-edited animals is already being raised on farms and in laboratories around the world - some designed for food, some to fight disease, some, perhaps, as pets.

A new study shows that gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 technology can work in rhesus monkey embryos. The results, published in the current issue of Human Molecular Genetics, open the door for pursuing gene editing in nonhuman primates as models for new therapies, including pharmacological, gene-, and stem cell-based therapies, says Keith Latham, animal science professor at Michigan State University and lead author of the study.

Geneticist Jennifer Doudna co-invented a groundbreaking new technology for editing genes, called CRISPR-Cas9. The tool allows scientists to make precise edits to DNA strands, which could lead to treatments for genetic diseases … but could also be used to create so-called "designer babies." Doudna reviews how CRISPR-Cas9 works - and asks the scientific community to pause and discuss the ethics of this new tool.

7:00 video: This film is the first of a two part series on the evolution of new genetic information. Here we focus on Point Mutations - the simplest natural mechanisms known to increase the genetic information of a population. Our second film of the series will focus on duplication events - natural mutations that increase the total amount of genetic information of an individual. This film was produced under the guidance of molecular biologist Dr. Nicholas Casewell. http://www.lstmed.ac.uk/about/people/... Point mutations are small, natural edits in the DNA code of an individual. These edits can be passed from parent to child. Because they are mere edits, point mutations usually do not increase the total amount of information in an individual. As new information is gained, old information is lost. Point mutations do, however, increase the total amount of information within a population. In this film you will see several examples of beneficial point mutations which have enhanced a creatures abilities or even given rise to entirely new abilities. The first two examples were directly observed in bacteria by scientists in the lab. The third is a case found in domestic dogs, the last example was discovered in several species of wild animal.

Chinese scientists say they've genetically modified human embryos for the very first time. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for beta-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. Gene editing is a recently developed type of genetic engineering in which DNA is inserted, replaced, or removed. Here, experts weigh-in with ethical questions and considerations.

A British researcher has received permission to use a powerful new genome editing technique on human embryos, even though researchers throughout the world are observing a voluntary moratorium on making changes to DNA that could be passed down to subsequent generations.

In a striking advance that helps open the door to organ transplants from animals, researchers have created gene-edited piglets cleansed of viruses that might cause disease in humans.

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Three years ago, Dr. Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make one of the most monumental discoveries in biology: a relatively easy way to alter any organism's DNA, just as a computer user can edit a word in a document.

Sharmila Nikapota, the mother of a child with a rare genetic disorder, has high hopes for gene editing. "For us this technology holds the unimaginable dream of a cure," she says. Her 13-year-old daughter Sohana has spent her entire life covered in painful blisters, the result of a condition called recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa.

This animation depicts the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing - a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedical research, including the potential to treat human genetic disease. Feng Zhang, a leader in the development of this technology, is a faculty member at MIT, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and a core member of the Broad Institute. Further information can be found on Prof. Zhang's website at http://zlab.mit.edu .

We went to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to get the lowdown on the CRISPR gene-editing patent dispute. Read C&EN's coverage here:

If you're like me, you hate writing "needs support" and/or "lacks evidence" on students' papers. If you do this activity, you won't have to (as much). Here's how it works.

CRISPR still has a long way to go before it can be used safely and effectively to repair-not just disrupt-genes in people. That is particularly true for most diseases, such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, which require correcting genes in a living person because if the cells were first removed and repaired then put back, too few would survive. And the need to treat cells inside the body means gene editing faces many of the same delivery challenges as gene transfer-researchers must devise efficient ways to get a working CRISPR into specific tissues in a person, for example. CRISPR also poses its own safety risks. Most often mentioned is that the Cas9 enzyme that CRISPR uses to cleave DNA at a specific location could also make cuts where it's not intended to, potentially causing cancer.

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the CRISPR/Cas immune system was identified in bacteria and how the CRISPR/Cas9 system was developed to edit genomes.

Technical details aside, Crispr-Cas9 makes it easy, cheap, and fast to move genes around-any genes, in any living thing, from bacteria to people. "These are monumental moments in the history of biomedical research," Baltimore says. "They don't happen every day." Using the three-year-old technique, researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS. Agronomists have rendered wheat invulnerable to killer fungi like powdery mildew, hinting at engineered staple crops that can feed a population of 9 billion on an ever-warmer planet. Bioengineers have used Crispr to alter the DNA of yeast so that it consumes plant matter and excretes ethanol, promising an end to reliance on petrochemicals. Startups devoted to Crispr have launched. International pharmaceutical and agricultural companies have spun up Crispr R&D. Two of the most powerful universities in the US are engaged in a vicious war over the basic patent.

An international group of scientists meeting in Washington called on Thursday for what would, in effect, be a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome. The group said it would be "irresponsible to proceed" until the risks could be better assessed and until there was "broad societal consensus about the appropriateness" of any proposed change. The group also held open the possibility for such work to proceed in the future by saying that as knowledge advances, the issue of making permanent changes to the human genome "should be revisited on a regular basis."