From Birger Johansson
Michael Le Page suggests curing male infertility could be what makes germline gene editing acceptable (2 July, p 19). I suggest it would be twice as acceptable if the same treatment also cured a uniquely female ailment.
Could we, for example, work to address disabling premenstrual syndrome or premenstrual dysphoric disorder? Its causes in genes controlling interactions of a neurosteroid, allopregnanolone, with the neurotransmitter system are being studied at Sweden's Umea University – which is also where Emmanuelle Charpentier made her big discovery of using “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” in DNA as the basis of the CRISPR gene-editing technique.
Umea, Sweden
