Heritable Genome Editing: Is a Moratorium Needed?

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, biomedical scientist Eli Adashi and legal scholar Glenn Cohen detail some of the arguments against moratoria from the perspective of leading genome editing scientists. They criticize moratoria for several reasons: slowing scientific progress, withholding potential medical treatments, increasing medical tourism, favoring ideology over pure scientific inquiry, being overly broad and thus producing unintended effects, and simply being unnecessary given the capacity of scientists to self-regulate. At the same time, they argue that the word moratorium may carry little force in practice, as calls for moratoria seem to amount to little more than discouragement of scientific research activity pending discussion among scientists and policymakers. Referring to Lander et al.’s call for a moratorium, the authors specifically criticize calls for “broad societal consensus,” pointing out the lack of frameworks or precedent for producing such consensus and noting the urgency of doing so for the treatment of monogenic disorders.