Scientist who gene-edited babies is back in lab and ‘proud’ of past work despite jailing
China’s He Jiankui, who used Crispr to edit genome, says he is working on genetic diseases and suggests human embryo gene editing will one day be accepted
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He said the three genome-edited children were “perfectly healthy and have no problems with their growth”, according to the newspaper, adding that the twins, now aged 5, were attending kindergarten.
This motherfucker is playing William Tell with baby genes and claiming it's safe because he didn't put an arrow into somebody's forehead. He won't even know if he hit the apple unless he exposes the children to HIV.
The more terrifying aspect is he might have hit the wrong targets.
And we might not know for generations.
Yeah but the babies also wouldn't have been born without him, had an HIV positive parent and he did a ton for crispr research. He was only disgraced 'disappeared' and jailed because PR was bad. He really didn't do anything too awful (I think he was too manipulative of the parents) but most of the media you see paints him like doctor fucking Mengele.
He was criticized also because the girls were not in danger of becoming infected. See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6724388/ :
The Chinese episode has also generated other issues. Several notes demonstrate that this was an experiment and not a therapeutic intervention (even He Jiankui called it a 'clinical trial'). The babies were not at risk of being born with HIV, given that sperm washing had been used so that only non-infected genetic material was used. Further, even though one of the parents (or both) was infected, it did not mean the children were more prone to becoming infected. The risk of becoming infected by the parents' virus was very low (Cowgill et al., 2008). In sum, there was no curative purpose, nor even the intention to prevent a pressing risk. Finally, the interventions were different for each twin. In one case, the two copies of CCR5 were modified, whereas in the other only one copy was modified. This meant that one twin could still become infected, although the evolution of the disease would probably be slower. The purpose of the scientific team was apparently to monitor the evolution of both babies and the differences in how they reacted to their different genetic modifications. This note also raised the issue of parents' informed consent regarding human experimentation, which follows a much stricter regimen than consent for therapeutic procedures.
Other critical articles (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8524470/) have also cited in particular https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4779710/, which states in the result section:
No HIV transmission occurred in 11,585 cycles of assisted reproduction using washed semen among 3,994 women (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0–0.0001). Among the subset of HIV-infected men without plasma viral suppression at the time of semen washing, no HIV seroconversions occurred among 1,023 women following 2,863 cycles of assisted reproduction using washed semen (95%CI= 0–0.0006). Studies that measured HIV transmission to infants reported no cases of vertical transmission (0/1,026, 95% CI= 0–0.0029). Overall, 56.3% (2,357/4,184, 95%CI=54.8%–57.8%) of couples achieved a clinical pregnancy using washed semen.
Good info. You're absolutely right.
