Bioethical Concerns of CRISPR: a Genome Editing Technology

Abstract

A recent and major scientific achievement in the field of biotechnology is the discovery of CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). CRISPR has become one of the most modern and popular tools, mainly due to its low cost and efficiency, which could be used to edit the genome. As a result, this technology holds key to almost every dimension of biomedical and agricultural sciences, and has potential applications in the treatment of viral infections, hemophilia, cancer and inherited genetic anomalies. However, ethical issues could crop up when this technology for editing genes could be unfairly used to improve biological features, solely for the purpose of aesthetics or to gain advantage over others in the population. This would not only lead to societal discrimination and unrest, but also have the potential to change the course of evolution in living beings. In this regard, regulated implementation of the CRISPR technology, risk assessment, policies and procedures should be in place to prevent gross misuse of this technology.

The Challenge of CRISPR-Cas Toward Bioethics

“…This is due to the fact that the total effectiveness is still being observed and without adverse effects, that is, in the trial period. The doubt is that the Cas 9 protein has not shown a 100% effectiveness, since it has a relatively frequent variability of cut, so there is a diversity of modified sequences and some with some similarity to other mutations, which could generate adverse effects (Bhan et al, 2017;Caballero-Hernández et al, 2017).…”

“…Due to the lack of confidence in the CRISPR Cas system and its application in the cure of genetic diseases, voices have arisen claiming to be careful with releasing them, in addition to the fact that few or perhaps none of the countries are already thinking about laws that regulate the use of these techniques, in addition to the probable complication of patent application. The question arises as to whether the modified genetic sequences are patentable (Capella, 2016;Bhan et al, 2017).…”