Get Ready for a Freakout

In a paper published Tuesday in the journal eLife, researchers in the lab of George Church at Harvard University seek broader guidelines to encompass characteristics of engineered embryo- and organ-like structures, which they refer to as “synthetic human entities with embryo-like features,” or SHEEFs.

The paper’s four authors recount how, in 2015, a scientist in the lab was working with adult reprogrammed cells, trying to grow them into brain “organoids.” [...] Even though the cells weren’t embryos, the lab wondered if this was in an ethical gray zone, says John Aach, a member of the lab and an author of the eLife paper.

The researcher was unable to replicate what he saw and moved on to another project, but the ethical questions lingered, says Dr. Aach.

[...]

“We have not crossed any recognizable red lines. There’s still time to talk.”

  WSJ

Aach.

In the U.S., guidelines limit research on human embryos past 14 days of development, or when the primitive streak appears—the so-called 14-day rule.

[...]

Dr. Brivanlou says the 14-day guidelines apply to human embryos and not to synthetic entities like what his lab created in that experiment.

“They are not embryos,” says Dr. Brivanlou. “They will never be implanted in a uterus.”

Famous last words.

(Do not take that to mean I object to this type of research.)

The Harvard researchers argue that research limits should not be tied only to the appearance of a feature like the primitive streak. Rather, they write that research limits should be set at the first condition “that directly raises moral concern.”

After all, we have so few?

“We are developing more capabilities for manipulating humanness,” says Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at Harvard‘s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a member of the stem-cell oversight committee that considered the Church lab’s experiment. “We still do not know the right boundary line between permissible and impermissible research impinging on humanness.”

I'm not sure we've ever adequately established what humanness is.

And, can they use animals for the research if they can't use people?

Ethics are complex (and sometimes individual) aren't they?

h/t pourmecoffee

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.