>>23
Complicated issue
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declined to comment on gene editing, saying it’s not "a presidential issue." Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova, when asked if Rebrikov’s proposal will get the greenlight, told Bloomberg that "an ethics committee will deal with this very complicated issue."

In several interviews in Moscow, Rebrikov, 43, said he’s openly pushing ahead with the project because he’s both confident in the procedure’s safety and tired of waiting for officials to establish legal parameters for Crispr’s use. Russian law doesn’t address the issue directly and it may take the World Health Organization another year or more to establish formal gene-editing guidelines.

“Everyone is just yammering,” Rebrikov said during a break at one his labs. “I want the rules to be set, but nobody is doing this.”

While known experiments with Crispr—to improve crops, modify malaria-carrying mosquitoes, treat cancer—are constantly expanding, no government has approved wielding the tool to manipulate what’s called human germlines. China condemned the work of researcher He Jiankui last year as “unlawful” after He announced the birth of twin girls who were genetically altered to be resistant to HIV. He’s not been heard from since and rarely seen.

Potential misuses
One senior Russian official involved in the Rebrikov debate said the potential misuses of Crispr are so profound that Putin, despite what his spokesman says, will “definitely” make the final call on the matter, even if the decision is communicated privately.

Putin, 66, has made it increasingly clear in recent years that he expects genetic engineering’s eventual impact on society to be as great as or even greater than artificial intelligence—in ways both good and bad. In 2017, he predicted “people” would start editing pre-birth human DNA “very soon,” a development with possible military applications that he’s warned could be “more terrible than a nuclear bomb.”

Last year, before He revealed his achievement, which was widely condemned, Putin allocated about $2 billion for genetic research and named Vorontsova to the 30-person panel overseeing the work. It’s an area of study that Putin has said will “determine the future of the whole world.”