Professor Hank Greely weighs in on the current American bans on gene editing in embryos for Scientific American.

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reaffirmed its ban on research that involves gene-editing of human embryos. In a statement released on April 29, NIH director Francis Collins spelled out the agency’s long-standing policy against funding such research and the ethical and legal reasons for it.

The statement comes after Nature’s report last week that researchers in China had used a gene-editing technology called CRISPR to remove disease genes from a human embryo. That research was published in Protein & Cell on April 18.

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Unlike many other countries, the United States does not ban work in human embryos outright. While some US states do have such restrictions, others’ rules are less clear and some do not ban it at all, says bioethicist Hank Greely of Stanford University in California. In these states, researchers could carry on with private funding.