Research team edits the DNA of fertilized human embryos

For several weeks, rumors have been circulating that a research group in China had performed the first targeted editing of DNA in human embryos. Today, the rumors were confirmed by the appearance of a paper in the journal Protein & Cell, describing genome editing performed at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. The paper shows that while the technique can work, it doesn’t work very efficiently, suggesting there are a lot of hurdles between existing techniques and widespread genetic engineering of humanity.