A federal biosafety and ethics panel took a page from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” on Tuesday and approved a new gene-editing technique for cancer patients.

A unanimous vote by members of the National Institute of Health’s Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) on Tuesday was cheered by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania. Their plan is to genetically engineer immune systems to fight cancer cells using a technique called CRISPR cas-9. The decision sets the stage for the Food and Drug Administration and relevant medical centers to follow suit.

“Our preliminary data suggests that we could improve the efficacy of these T cells if we use CRISPR,” University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Carl June told the panel, the medical website STAT reported Tuesday.

Dr. Michael Atkins, a member of the committee and an oncologist at Georgetown University School of Medicine, said the “really exiting, first-in-human” study would “hopefully form the basis of new [cancer] therapies.”

If the FDA lends its support to the study, then a clinical trial with 15 patients would begin at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas; the University of California, San Francisco; and Penn.

The study will be funded by the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and affect patients with multiple myeloma, melanoma, and sarcoma.

Critics of the new technology have warned that using it on a large scale opens a biological Pandora’s Box. Designer babies and bioweapons are just some of the ethical concerns raised by experts.

“If other countries start engineering kids to have higher IQs, the U.S. might have to start so we don’t fall behind,” the technology website Gizmodo reported Wednesday. “That worry isn’t unfounded, since Chinese scientists have already edited the human genome of an embryo, creating changes that would be heritable, though in this case they did not use viable embryos.”

The website went on to call CRISPR an “ethical minefield” that lawmakers will traverse in the years ahead.

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