A Letter To The World Health Organization

W.H.O. Needs to Govern ALL CRISPR Research

Dear Global Health Ethics Unit,

My name is Andy Liang and I am a student at City College of San Francisco.  I have been learning a lot about CRISPR this semester in my English class, and becoming more concerned about future research.

I’ve learned about He Jianku’s experiment with human embryos that resulted in the birth of twin girls. An experiment that did not need to be done because H.I.V. is already being studied extensively, with current treatments and prevention methods being very effective. There are also many experiments involving CRISPR that are moving to clinical trials, which means regulations need to catch up in order to keep people safe through those trials.

I have come to a conclusion that CRISPR research needs to be governed by ONE entity, the W.H.O.  It needs to be you because you are an organization with relations all over the world.  I believe the W.H.O. is THE path to standardization of future CRISPR research.

I understand that the W.H.O. recently established a panel specifically for the purpose of guiding research relating to gene-editing.  This is a great start, but MORE should be done.  I urge you to read my post titled, “W.H.O. Should Do What?” on my website https://andyhliang.wordpress.com. My suggestions on what needs to be done on page 5.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

A Concerned Human

W.H.O. Should Do What?

 

Image created from Hywards, Getty Images, and Shutterstock

-Knock knock!

-Who’s there?

-Yes

-What?

-Where are you going with this? When is a good time? We are the World Health Organization and we are here to investigate.

CRISPR(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a tool that scientists can use to cut out and replace specific parts of genes.  It has the potential to cure diseases, create new drugs, and even alter the human genome. CRISPR is too powerful NOT to police. The World Health Organization [W.H.O.] needs to set up parameters for future CRISPR research.

Who Cares About Medical Research?

Image taken from BioBeef

   Everybody invests in medical research, but the returns are not the same for everybody.  Governments and corporations spend copious amounts of money on medical research, and the reasons why are very different.  

Live Science is Alive and Thriving!

 

Shutterstock image. Retrieved from Live Science

“Knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.”

Science, as defined by Merriam Webster Dictionary

Live Science was launched in 2004. It is a website with articles on topics like Technology, Health, Space, Animals, etc. Live Science is a credible website because articles are posted every day about different science topics, by authors with expertise in their fields, with accurate information.

Rhetorical Analysis of “Before the Claims of Crispr Babies, There Was China’s One-Child Policy” by Mei Fong

(Illustration by Marina Muun)
Image retrieved from TED ideas

What’s the Big Deal?

Is it really such a surprise that the first Crispr baby, a baby born from a gene edited embryo, was created in China?  Mei Fong, author of a book about China’s one-child policy wrote “Before the Claims of Crispr Babies, There Was China’s One-Child Policy,” published in 2018 in The New York Times, and she argues that the first Crispr baby was inevitably going to be Chinese.  Fong makes good use of ethos and logos to strengthen her argument, while downplaying pathos as to not rile up her audience about ethical issues.  Fong’s balance of statistics, paired with her knowledge of China’s reproductive policy history, and emotional appeals, makes for a strong argument that we should have expected the first Crispr baby to come from China.

Gene Editing with CRISPR

“The gene-editing technology Crispr has the power to remake life as we know it.”

(The New York Times Editorial Board, 2019)  

(Illustration by Michael S. Helfenbein)
Image retrieved from Yale News

Gene Editing with CRISPR

Gene editing involves technologies that scientists can use to alter an organism’s DNA. According to Morgan Maeder and Charles Gersbach (2016), a scientist for Editas Medicine in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, respectively, two of the most current technologies used are “TALENs (Transcription Activator-like Effector Nucleases)” (p. 433) and “CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)” (p. 441).  I am going to focus on CRISPR because it can target very specific genes, and because it is an easier to use technique.