The National Academy of Sciences' Washington headquarters played host to a meeting of hundreds of scientists who will discuss gene editing.
According to The Washington Post, lawmakers and White House science advisers took advantage of the venue as well, and joined the meetings Tuesday. Among the conference's sponsors are the National Academy of Medicine, Great Britain's Royal Academy, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
At the center of the discussions is a gene editing method called CRISPR-Cas9, which Chinese scientists have been actively pursuing.
"The overriding question is when, if ever, we will want to use gene editing to change human inheritance," The Post quoted David Baltimore, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and the summit's chair, saying in his address. "These are deep and disturbing questions that we hope will be illuminated by this meeting."
The MIT Technology Review described CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) as "an easy, cheap, and very precise way to 'edit' the DNA of living cells." At the center of the debate is whether or not scientists should be able to correct genes that could cause disease later in a human's life prior to the person's birth.
Jennifer Doudna, researcher and professor at University of California, Berkeley, joined "CBS This Morning" on Monday to discuss CRISPR.
"Think about a film strip," Doudna said. "You see a particular segment of the film that you want to replace. And if you had a film splicer, you would go in and literally cut it out and piece it back together -- maybe with a new clip.
"Imagine being able to do that in the genetic code, the code of life," she said. "You could go in and... snip out a piece and replace it with something that corrects a mutation that would cause disease."
