Scientist in China defends human embryo gene editing
The Chinese scientist
who claims
to have altered the DNA of twin girls before birth – without going
through the usual scientific channels – said he was proud of his work, and
claimed another woman enrolled in his trial was pregnant with a similarly
modified baby. The scientist, He
Jiankui, spoke to hundreds of colleagues and journalists on Wednesday at the
International Human Genome Editing Summit at the University of Hong Kong. He said details of the
first births from the trial, which used gene-editing technology known as
Crispr-Cas9, had been submitted to a scientific journal, which he did not name.
Nor did he say when the results might be published.
In a planned
presentation, He, an associate professor at Southern University of Science and
Technology, in Shenzhen, described how he used Crispr-Cas9 to modify a gene
called CCR5 in a number of embryos created through IVFfor couples with
HIV-positive fathers. The modification was
intended to mirror a natural mutation found in a small percentage of people
which makes them resistant to the virus. Two girls named Nana and Lulu were
born with the genetic changes, he said.
The researcher’s
40-minute Q&A offered a charged forum for scientists to publicly question a
colleague caught in controversy. The Nobel laureate
David Baltimore, an organiser of the summit, who is professor emeritus of
biology at the California Institute of Technology, called He’s work
irresponsible. “I think there has been a failure of self regulation by the
scientific community because of a lack of transparency,” Baltimore said.
David Liu, a biologist
at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, challenged He on how the
girls might benefit from having their DNA altered. The children were not at
risk of contracting HIV at birth and he said there were many ways to avoid HIV
infection later in life. “What was the unmet medical need for these patients in
particular?” Liu asked... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/28/scientist-in-china-defends-human-embryo-gene-editing
