"Crispr-cas9 causes unexpected mutation" is questioned again

In the middle of last month, scientists from editas medicine and intellia therapeutics wrote to the editorial department of nature, respectively, asking for a letter entitled "unexpected productions after CRISPR – cas9 editing in Recently, seven scientists from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of technology, Massachusetts General Hospital and broad research institute jointly published in biorxiv, asking the author to correct the title and conclusion of the original text, or to provide more experimental data CRISPR gene editing technology is one of the hottest cutting-edge technologies in recent years In 2015, it was rated as "annual scientific breakthrough" by science magazine, and relevant applications were also selected as "annual Top Ten technological breakthroughs" by MIT Technology Review in 2014 and 2016, with a very broad application prospect However, in May this year, nature methods published an article entitled "unexpected mutations after CRISPR – cas9 editing in vivo", which poured cold water on CRISPR technology Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have found that CRISPR technology can introduce hundreds of unexpected gene mutations in mice Soon, editas medicine and intellia The scientists of therapeutics wrote to the editorial office of nature to question the scientific nature of the experimental design, data obtained and conclusions made by researchers from the medical center of Columbia University: the whole experiment only involves three mice, two processed mice and one untreated control mouse The whole experiment is only based on one sgRNA data and only displays one SNV data These numbers are serious Insufficient, the number of animals and grouping problems also lead to many irrationalities such as later data In response to the dispute, a nature spokesman said it was just a letter from readers Sometimes, readers' letters will publish short articles concerning research methods of interest to the research community, which may contain new research data The article was peer-reviewed before it was published Recently, Professor Caleb lareau and other scientists from Harvard University wrote in biorxiv that a large number of common gene variations in the two mice may have existed in advance, because they are closely related to their parents and should not be "attributed" to CRISPR, and these gene variations appear far away from the editing site, further proving that they have nothing to do with gene editing The seven scientists therefore strongly suggested that Columbia University scientists publish articles acknowledging that the original title and conclusions are misleading, or resubmit more data more in line with the experimental requirements to support their conclusions "Otherwise, people will mistakenly think that the data is enough to support the serious security problems of CRISPR, which will have a serious impact on the development of CRISPR editing technology." At the same time, these scientists believed that the publication of relevant articles by nature at that time was a serious mistake of peer review.