Max Mehlman and co-authors recently published an article in the Journal of Law and Biosciences entitled “Governing Nonconventional Genetic Experimentation.” In 2019, Mehlman received a grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH to examine ethical, legal, and policy issues raised by gene editing experiments that take place outside of traditional settings, such as in community labs and experimenters' homes. Along with his co-investigator Ronald Conlon, Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genome Sciences at the CWRU School of Medicine, and consultant Alex Perlman, Mehlman presented the research results in the article.
Although finding that this form of nontraditional genomic experimentation currently posed no significant health or safety risks, they recommend increased efforts by community labs and the nontraditional experimental community to regulate themselves. Such regulation should include establishing a community-wide Institutional Review Board to which experimenters voluntarily submit proposed experiments for review.