(FUTURISM) Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov is one step closer to creating CRISPR babies.
On Friday, the journal Nature reported that Rebrikov claimed in an email sent the day prior that he had already used the gene-editing tech to tinker with the genetic code of donated humans eggs — a major step forward in his plan to edit human embryos to prevent children from inheriting their parents’ deafness.
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Rebrikov told Nature in July that he’d found five pairs of deaf parents willing to let him use CRISPR to edit their embryos. The goal of those edits would be to ensure the children born from the embryos wouldn’t inherit a deafness-causing mutation in the GJB2 gene.
