Hancock calls for ethics rules to govern genome editing

Matt Hancock, secretary for health and social care, has said there needs to be an ethics framework to guide genome-editing research and has promised to unlock anonymised data for health research.

Speaking at the Royal Society on 20 March, Hancock said that whole-genome sequencing was “revolutionary” and required the creation of ethics rules for diagnostic and predictive genomics, as well as for editing the human genome.

“We need a clear framework so that we, as a society, can make active choices over how the science is used,” he said.