Professor Hank Greely weighs in on the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes after news that researchers in China have begun editing the genomes of human embryos.

The US House of Representatives is wading into the debate over whether human embryos should be modified to introduce heritable changes. Its fiscal year 2016 spending bill for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would prohibit the agency from spending money to evaluate research or clinical applications for such products.

In an unusual twist, the bill — introduced on 17 June — would also direct the FDA to create a committee that includes religious experts to review a forthcoming report from the US Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM’s analysis, which considers the ethics of creating embryos that have three genetic parents, was commissioned by the FDA.

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“This step seems dumb — or ill-advised,” says Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford University in California. It might also be premature because the FDA has not shown any indication that it would approve such research. And such a ban would not apply to the type of research that the Chinese scientists performed, because the embryos they used were not viable.

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Greely suspects that the Republican majority in Congress “is trying to throw a (cheap) bone to some of its supporters; regrettable (to me), but not important”. The House appropriations committee, which drafted the FDA spending bill, did not respond to requests for comment.