Why We Need a Summit on Human Gene Editing

摘要

In 1981, Matthew Meselson pointed out that the puzzle brought to light by Darwin, of what constitutes heredity, was solved in two tranches. The first lasted from 1900, when Mendel's work of the last half of the nineteenth century came into the conscious-ness of the scientific community. It lasted until 1950 or so, when the rules of genetic inheritance had been firmly established. We then entered a new world of molecular genetics, learning first the chemistry of the underlying molecules of inheritance. Once we knew the chemistry and the topology of the DNA molecule, we learned how to cut it and how to paste it. That resulted in the recombinant DNA revolution of the mid-1970s.