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“We don’t understand genetic correction well enough to make it a safe technique”

MADRID, 23 Feb. (EDITIONS) –

Gene editing can allow us to correct the genetic causes of many diseases, modify the genome of embryos so that babies are born disease-free. However, to this day, there is still a lot of research to be done to master genomic technology.

In this line works the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine, geneticist, biochemist and former President of the British Royal Society Sir Paul Nurse during an interview with Infosalus, who celebrates that, increasingly, scientists are being able to change genes in very precise ways.

“If these methods could be refined and made safe, then we could use gene therapy to correct some genetic diseases. However, if the genetic correction is carried out at the level of the first cell produced in the fertilization of an egg with spermThis can have many consequences for the later adult and all subsequent generations, “warns the Prince of Asturias in Communication and Humanities.

And it is that, one of the main doubts that today revolve around gene therapy on embryos is that, although they can be freed from a future disease, it is nevertheless 100% unknown if that mutation can cause another mutation , which in turn gives them other problems.

Thus, Nurse, who has devoted much of his career to discovering how living cells work, argues that “if a genetic disease is very well understood and the mutated defect simply leads to a disease outcome, then such therapy might be justified.” However, it does warn that “we often don’t understand enough to make this a safe procedure.”

Precisely, Paul Nurse has just published in Spain ‘What is life’? (Planet), a manual to “explain some of the great ideas in Biology that are not often talked about.”

With this, he underlines that in order to understand what it means to be alive, one must understand the 5 great ideas of Biology that he defends in his book: “The cell, which is the atom of Biology and is the basic unit of all life; the gene , which is the basis of heredity; evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin’s great idea that all living organisms evolve by natural selection, which allows them to acquire a purpose by acting as a whole; and two more ideas are to understand life as chemistry, and life as information. “

WHEN DOES THE HUMAN BEING ARISE?

In his opinion, if you put all these ideas together you can count on the principles to define life. “Living things are limited physical entities that are chemical, physical, and informational machines. This allows them to stay, grow, and reproduce. These properties combined with a system of inheritance that exhibits variability allow living organisms to evolve by natural selection. Now, there is no single quality that can define life, it is a combination of all the above, “says the English geneticist.

Here Nurse also values ​​that it is “quite extraordinary” that a complex human being can arise from a single cell: “This means that we should think more about cells because they are the basic unit that sustains all life. Within the first cell of a human being produced at conception, are all the instructions that are needed to eventually make a human. What, of course, is not so clear is at what stage during that process from a single cell to the baby produced at birth a human being actually emerges. “

Asked about the reasons why we resemble our parents or relatives, the English scientist maintains that the reason mainly attends to the genes that are transmitted from our parents through us to our children. “This leads to constancy in the genetic makeup of the generations, but with variability. It arises because different combinations of genes are mixed between generations, and mutations can also arise in those genes. Therefore, each person is unique except identical twins, although even there there may be mutations that cause differences, “he warns.

It also states that all aspects of our life are determined in part by our genes and in part by the environment in which we grow up: “This includes behavior and our attitude towards life. Some characteristics are determined more by genes and others more for the environment. “

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