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U.K. Researcher Receives Permission To Edit Genes In Human Embryos

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: February 1st, 2016, 3:00pm UTC

sciencehabit writes: Developmental biologist Kathy Niakan has received permission from U.K. authorities to modify human embryos using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. Niakan, who works at the Francis Crick Institute in London, applied for permission to use the technique in studies to better understand the role of key genes during the first few days of human embryo development. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which grants licenses for work with human embryos, sperm, and eggs in the United Kingdom, approved Niakan's application at a meeting of HFEA's license committee on 14 January. The minutes of that meeting state that, '[o]n balance, the proposed use of CRISPR/Cas9 was considered by the Committee to offer better potential for success, and was a justified technical approach to obtaining research data about gene function from the embryos used.'pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=U.K.+Researcher+Receives+Permission+To+Edit+Genes+In+Human+Embryos%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1QCmy3D"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F16%2F02%2F01%2F1816204%2Fuk-researcher-receives-permission-to-edit-genes-in-human-embryos%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/02/01/1816204/uk-researcher-receives-permission-to-edit-genes-in-human-embryos?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/02/01/1816204/uk-researcher-receives-permission-to-edit-genes-in-human-embryos?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/vyRmSOWS6Ns" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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