CRISPR's unwanted anniversary

In this brief opinion piece, one of CRISPR/Cas9’s lead developers, Jennifer Doudna, marks the one-year anniversary of the reveal of He Jiankui’s experiments. Doudna identifies the response form the global scientific community as “encouraging,” believing that it created the possibility for broade4r conversations about CRISPR’s applications. However, she also orients this conversation toward transparency and responsible application of CRISPR and foregrounds health and safety concerns. On the topic of a moratorium, Doudna argues that it would be preferable to instead develop regulations for applications that will not “stifle” the technology and points to existing efforts from scientific advisory bodies as promising examples. These positions collectively reproduce a framing of CRISPR that makes its application to the human germline seem inevitable.