Dr. Collins reflects on career at NIH, COVID response effort, work on genome sequencing

Dr. Francis Collins:

I get worried.

I feel we now observed 1 instance, where by a Chinese scientist, irrespective of the quite general global settlement that gene enhancing really should not be utilized for human embryos, did so anyway. I never imagine that is occurred due to the fact due to the fact of the robust outcry.

This is this sort of a paradox, however, Judy, since gene enhancing applied in other locations, not to embryos, but to people with sickle cell ailment to deal with what is actually producing their sickness by modifying their bone marrow, is like 1 of the most thrilling, most astounding developments in the last five several years, a person that I am wildly enthusiastic about, and have place a great deal of NIH means into it.

But that’s pretty diverse. That won’t get into the hereditary DNA that is going to get handed to the next era. If you’re doing hereditary DNA on people, you have crossed a line into territory that I don’t assume we are good enough to go into and that has implications, the two in phrases of security, but also in conditions of theology and philosophy about, are we heading to reinvent who we are?

I don’t feel we are prepared to do that.