Bioethical dithering on gene therapy comes at expense of patients’ lives

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Activist Marcy Darnovsky published an op-ed in April that was antagonistic toward new gene therapy interventions that soon may be used to treat some of the most grotesque genetic diseases imaginable. “The biological risks and ethical implications of reproductive gene editing would be unacceptable,” she concluded.

This is just the sort of navel-gazing, callous bloviating one might expect from someone with a Ph.D. in “History of Consciousness”–someone who has never done biomedical research or diagnosed or treated a patient, and whose work focuses on the “social justice and public interest implications” of biotechnology. (Translation: She’s way more worried about those “public interest implications” than about actual human suffering and premature death.)

Darnovsky is wrong on both the science and the ethics. What’s really unacceptable is philosophizing and dithering while kids die unnecessarily.

Read full, original post: We Desperately Need Bioethicists…To Get Out Of The Way Of Gene Therapy

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