Deaf couple may edit embryo’s DNA to correct hearing mutation.

Pedro_P

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A Moscow couple considering having a second child shares a genetic mutation that guarantees any son or daughter will have hearing loss. Sergey Ponomarev
▼ This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
On a lightly snowing Sunday evening, a potential participant in Denis Rebrikov’s controversial plans to create gene-edited  babiesmeets with me at a restaurant in a Moscow suburb. She does not want to be identified beyond her patronymic, Yevgenievna. We sit at a corner table in an empty upstairs section of the restaurant while live Georgian music plays downstairs. Yevgenievna, in her late 20s, cannot hear it—or any music. She has been deaf since birth. But with the help of a hearing aid that’s linked to a wireless microphone, which she places on the table, she can hear some sounds, and she is adept at reading lips. She speaks to me primarily in Russian, through a translator, but she is also conversant in English.
Yevgenievna and her husband, who is partially deaf, want to have children who will not inherit hearing problems. There is nothing illicit about our discussion: Russia has no clear regulations prohibiting Rebrikov’s plan to correct the deafness mutation in an in vitro fertilization (IVF) embryo. But Yevgenievna is uneasy about publicity. “We were told if we become the first couple to do this experiment we’ll become famous, and HBO already tried to reach me,” Yevgenievna says. “I don’t want to be well known like an actor and have people bother me.” She is also deeply ambivalent about the procedure itself, a pioneering and potentially risky use of the CRISPR genome editor.
The couple met on  vk . com, a Russian Facebook of sorts, in a chat room for people who are hearing impaired. Her husband could hear until he was 15 years old, and still gets by with hearing aids. They have a daughter—Yevgenievna asks me not to reveal her age—who failed a hearing test at birth. Doctors initially believed it was likely a temporary problem produced by having a cesarean section, but 1 month later, her parents took her to a specialized hearing clinic. “We were told our daughter had zero hearing,” Yevgenievna says. “I was shocked, and we cried.”
Their daughter could have received a cochlear implant, an electronic device that uses surgically implanted electrodes to directly stimulate the auditory nerve. People with such implants can understand speech, but typically can’t hear music. But Yevgenievna and her husband weren’t interested in the device for their child because friends in the Russian deaf community had bad experiences with it—likely because they didn’t receive the proper rehabilitation after the surgery to deal with flood of new signals to the brain.
Later, they learned the cause of their daughter’s hearing loss was (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

Never knew one could "edit:" DNA. Altogether new development!

chanakyakripa

soothsayer 22-10-2019 12:56 PM
Never knew one could "edit:" DNA. Altogether new development!

There are certain molecular biology techniques called SPLICING & SLICING by which DNA can be edited.

Rhett_Bassard

Nationalistic: criticizing the Chinese for genetic mods, but not the Russians.
The floodgates are about to open onto a Brave New World.

As an after-thought, I just used the CM search function...
OMG...what self-respecting eBook repository doesn't already have Aldous Huxley's classic?
SMH, it's now uploaded. Link.
Hopefully, someone other than @Pedro_P can contribute a review or related YT videos.

abhidebb

Breakthrough Technology..Revolutionary Scientific Progress..Many deaf couples will be able to take advantage of this new development.