“It requires IVF because you have to have the embryo in a dish,” explained Stanford law professor Henry (Hank) Greely, a leading expert on ethical, legal, and social implications in bioscience technologies.

“You would need to do a lot of research with embryos in dishes, which I think is what he’s planning – to do human embryos, edit them, see how well the edits take, see how well they grow for the first 14 days or longer,” Greely speculated. “And in order to do this you’d have to do some research with human embryos.”

Greely said if the laboratory trials are promising, the next step in Harrington’s research could be to test on non-human primates.