The recently updated South African Ethics in Health Research Guidelines have been a recent cause of concern, with some researchers and bioethicists interpreting them as allowing what’s known as heritable human genome editing. Rather than allowing heritable human genome editing, the guidelines acknowledge the reality that South African law already allows human genome editing. That this was the purpose is …
A little-noticed change to South Africa’s national health research guidelines, published in May of this year, has put the country on an ethical precipice. Alignment with the law Further, there is a significant problem with the seemingly permissive stance on heritable human genome editing entrenched in these research guidelines. Ethical concerns The question that concerns us is: why are South …
China on Wednesday released a guideline that lays out a set of ethical rules for human genome editing research. Regarding clinical research involving genome editing of somatic cells — which are cells in the body other than sperm and egg cells, it said that such research should be aimed at preventing or treating diseases and should be carried out after …
The human reference genome has just got an upgrade: it is now a “pangenome” to represent more diversity between various individuals and populations. The upgrade from scientists on the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium, funded by the US National Human Genome Research Institute and involving researchers from American and European institutions, has been described in a set of six papers published …
