U.K. Researcher Receives Permission To Edit Genes In Human Embryos (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit writes: Developmental biologist Kathy Niakan has received permission from U.K. authorities to modify human embryos using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. Niakan, who works at the Francis Crick Institute in London, applied for permission to use the technique in studies to better understand the role of key genes during the first few days of human embryo development.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which grants licenses for work with human embryos, sperm, and eggs in the United Kingdom, approved Niakan's application at a meeting of HFEA's license committee on 14 January. The minutes of that meeting state that, '[o]n balance, the proposed use of CRISPR/Cas9 was considered by the Committee to offer better potential for success, and was a justified technical approach to obtaining research data about gene function from the embryos used.'

Comments

thus we continue into the death spiral

[ihtoit]

...of civilisation:
The term ‘eugenics’ was first used by Francis Galton in 1883 when examining the “comparative worth” of different races, to describe the improvement of man through “better breeding“. Other terms that evolved included:
Dysgenic: Elements believed to increase the occurrence of undesirable genes.
Negative eugenics: Those classified as the ‘genetically unfit.’
V.S.
Eugenic: Elements believed to increase the occurrence of desirable genes.
Positive eugenics: Those classified as the ‘genetically fit’.
Eugenic campaigns began in earnest in several nations including the UK, USA and Germany, with the establishment of the British Eugenics Education Society (1907), American Eugenics Society (1923) and the Society for Racial Hygiene (1905) respectively.
Eugenicists came to believe that the goal of ‘better breeding’ could be achieved through the sterilisation of dysgenic individuals and the promotion of breeding amongst the genetically fit.
Involuntary sterilisation was never passed as law in the UK, despite the campaigning of British eugenicists. In the USA and Germany however, the practice became widespread. Whilst less publicised than its German equivalent, the eugenics movement in the USA, resulted in the forced sterilisation of 65,000 individuals up to the program’s eventual end in the early 1970s.
In Germany however, eugenics found its ideal social and political environment in which it could thrive.
With the nation locked in a post- World War 1 economic crisis, eugenicists held the opinion that medical care had interfered with the laws of nature by keeping the weak alive and that “defectives” were reproducing faster than healthy individuals.
Amongst the so-called ‘defectives’ were the hereditary blind and deaf, those with “physical deformities” and the congenitally “feebleminded” (those with learning difficulties).
Fürsorge (care of the individual) was to be condemned whereas Vorsorge (preventative care for the good of the nation) was to become medicine’s priority; with the role of the physician as a “cultivator of the genes” and “biological soldier.”
The resulting eugenic campaign between 1933 included the forced sterilisation of up to 375,000 people between 1933-39; and ultimately the killing of hundreds of thousands of those deemed to be “life unworthy of life”. Doctors involved in the campaign claimed that the Hippocratic oath was a “vestige of ancient times” and that such killing complied with medical ethics since these people were mere “empty shells of human beings” and “effectively already dead.”
These actions by Nazi physicians is well summarised by Christian Pross:
"The search for truth in medicine turned into destruction when medicine abandoned the Hippocratic ‘nil nocere‘and this was done for science’s own “superior” aims."
Shall we even go there with the Aryan breeding programme and Lebensborn, which continues in BRITAIN to this day?