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Editing Genes In Human Embryos Doesn't Mean Designer Babies

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: February 16th, 2016, 4:00pm UTC

TheAlexKnapp writes: Dr. Kathy Niakan, who is leading the scientific team that just got the go-ahead to edit genes in human embryos, explains why their work won't lead to designer babies. The genes that they're looking at, she says, are unique to the human embryo, and the work's sole purpose is to understand early development. "We can use this new method that's extremely precise and efficient to ask questions about early development that has profound importance for stem cell biology, and for our understanding of why some embryos fail to thrive." But really ... how long until it turns into designer babies?pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Editing+Genes+In+Human+Embryos+Doesn't+Mean+Designer+Babies%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F20BYpwW"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%2F16%2F1919246%2Fediting-genes-in-human-embryos-doesnt-mean-designer-babies%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/16/02/16/1919246/editing-genes-in-human-embryos-doesnt-mean-designer-babies?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/16/02/16/1919246/editing-genes-in-human-embryos-doesnt-mean-designer-babies?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/1AmLYlT5m6w" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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