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"This is nano-surgery," says George Church, a prominent Harvard geneticist who also was not involved in the research. "You're doing it with the finest possible scalpel."

The editing tool very accurately cut into a mutated gene known as MYBPC3, which causes cardiomyopathy. To the researchers' surprise, the cut triggered the embryos to repair the defective gene on their own. This is a process that had previously been unknown, the scientists say.

"The most exciting moment was when we realized the mechanism of repair," Amato says. "It was fixing itself."

Scientific Panel Says Editing Heritable Human Genes Could Be OK In The Future
SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS
Scientific Panel Says Editing Heritable Human Genes Could Be OK In The Future
The researchers then let the embryos develop for several days so they could analyze them to see how well the experiments worked. In one part of the experiments involving 58 embryos, the approach corrected the mutation in more than 70 percent of the embryos, the researchers reported.