To save future children from deafness
Russian biologist told about new plans to create "GMO children"
Molecular biologist Denis Rebrikov from the Russian National Research Medical University named after N.I. Pirogov said that he plans to cure several children from congenital deafness with the help of the CRISPR/Cas9 genomic editor. This is reported by the online publication New Scientist.
According to Rebrikov, he has already found five married couples who agreed to participate in the experiments.
"They understand the essence of the problem very well – without genomic editing, any of their future children will be deaf," the scientist told the publication.
At the end of last year, Chinese molecular biologist He Jiankui said that for the first time he managed to edit the DNA of a human embryo and get the first "transgenic" children invulnerable to the immunodeficiency virus.
This caused a storm of protests among politicians, scientists and philosophers, Chinese law enforcement agencies and the ethical commission of the university became interested in Jiankui's activities.
A month ago, Rebrikov unexpectedly told Nature magazine that he intended to conduct similar experiments if he received permission for them.
The international and Russian scientific communities met these statements very skeptically: experts agree that the CRISPR/Cas9 system has not yet been recognized as absolutely safe for editing the human genome. But these objections did not convince Rebrikov, and he did not abandon his plans.
Although, according to New Scientist, he changed them somewhat: now, unlike the Chinese researcher, the Russian is going to do not protect the child from HIV, but return his hearing to him.
According to Rebrikov, many deaf people were born like this because of a small mutation in the GJB2 gene: when it appears, one of the "letters"-nucleotides disappears from the DNA chain due to errors in the copying and repair systems.
This genome damage is quite widespread among residents of Western Siberia, as well as the northwestern regions of Russia, but it causes deafness only if the mutation is present in both copies of GJB2. Accordingly, correcting at least one will protect the child from a similar fate.
In the coming weeks, Rebrikov plans to apply to the relevant authorities to obtain permission for experiments. In his opinion, such experiments have much more moral grounds than editing HIV-related genes, because there is no other way to get rid of hearing defects for children of deaf people.
Many Western experts disagree with the Russian scientist, who believe that the first experiments on editing the DNA of embryos should be carried out on embryos that were initially doomed to death due to more serious failures in the genome. According to Rebrikov, it is much more difficult to find living carriers of such mutations, and this limits the possibility of such experiments – unlike the fight against other non-lethal congenital diseases.
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