NIH Director Collins to Speak at ASGCT Policy Summit
ASGCT Staff - September 05, 2019
Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, will deliver his keynote address, "The Need for an International Moratorium on Clinical Uses of Human Germline Gene Editing," on day three of the ASGCT Policy Summit, November 6.
Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and a physician-geneticist, delivers his keynote address, “The Need for an International Moratorium on Clinical Uses of Human Germline Gene Editing,” at the ASGCT Policy Summit on November 6 at The Westin in Washington, D.C. His presentation, part of the Policy Summit’s third day of programming on Ethical, Societal, and Policy Issues in Germline Gene Editing, will address the reasons the NIH supports a moratorium at the present time, given safety issues, ethical concerns, and lack of sufficiently compelling medical applications.
"This is a crucial moment in the history of science: a new technology offers the potential to rewrite the script of human life," Collins wrote for Nature with Carrie D. Wolinetz, Ph.D., Associate Director for Science Policy at NIH. "We think that human gene editing for reproductive purposes carries very serious consequences — social, ethical, philosophical and theological. Such great consequences deserve deep reflection. A substantive debate about benefits and risks that provides opportunities for multiple segments of the world’s diverse population to take part has not yet happened."
Collins has served as the director of the NIH since August 2009, and is noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993-2008.
The full program for the November 6 session of the ASGCT Policy Summit, Ethical, Societal, and Policy Issues in Germline Gene Editing, addresses a variety of approaches to international engagement, monitoring, and prevention of violations of current boundaries on clinical use of germline gene editing. In addition, the current international legal and regulatory landscape and parameters for restrictions on germline gene editing will be explored. You can register online to be a part of this intimate audience (capped at 350 people) with NIH Director Francis Collins.
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