Chinese scientists let eugenics out of the bottle, by Jamie Walker.
He Jiankui let the genie out of the bottle when news broke this week that his team in China had genetically engineered newborn twins to be resistant to the AIDS virus.
Good job, you may think. But the implications of what this young and formerly little known researcher did are staggering.
In creating the world’s first DNA-enhanced babies, He took it on himself to bring the deeply contested science of eugenics into kicking, breathing life. …
Using a gene editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9, He claims to have disabled the gene that opens the door to the AIDS virus to invade cells and multiply. … The embryo, when only one to four cells in size, then was treated with the CRISPR “machinery”, painstakingly introduced by an embryologist using a tiny pipette. …
A high-minded explanation that he was giving HIV-affected couples, who face entrenched discrimination in China, “hope for life” was drowned out by the tsunami of international criticism.
His own university in Shenzhen disowned him and China’s vice-minister for science and technology, Xu Nanping, suggested he had breached regulations governing genetic research. …
As He discovered when the thunderbolt struck, ahead of his appearance on Wednesday at a drawcard scientific conference in Hong Kong, it is one thing to manipulate individual genes and quite another to manipulate the genome, nature’s instruction manual for the 37 trillion cells that make up the human body. …
Editing an embryo, as He did, … changes every cell in the body, including the sperm or eggs that would pass those modifications on to future generations. This is what responsible scientists are getting at when they caution against unforeseen consequences for the human germline.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
