In recent online videos, geneticist He Jiankui defended his recent achievement of embryonic gene editing, which he used on baby twin girls infected with HIV to protect them from the development of AIDS. This experimentation has caused alarm throughout the Chinese scientific community after investigations suggest that its ethical approval may have been forged. In an open letter, over 100 scientists reiterated the fact that the usage of CRISPR-Cas9 technology on human embryos is in fact dangerous and risked the reputation of the biomedical community in China. Although CRISPR-Cas9 technology (which acts as a “copy and paste” for DNA) is raising hope of disease prevention, the letter, describing this experiment as opening Pandora’s box, says “the biomedical ethics review for this so-called research exists in name only. Conducting direct human experiments can only be described as crazy”. Both China’s Genetic and Stem Cell Research Societies have declared He to be acting against regulations set in 2003. The\u00a0Shenzhen Harmonicare Hospital, where He claims the experiment took place, denies any gene-altering trials. The Harmonicare Medical Holdings also claims that “the signatures on the online form were suspected of having been forged and ‘no relevant meeting of the Medical Ethics Committee of the hospital in fact took place'”.The Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, where He is due to speak on Wednesday, claims they only heard of the experiment on Monday, and the Southern University of Science and Technology, where He is a professor, said they were unaware of any experiments and that He has been on leave without pay since February. “We don’t know if this work is real or fake. If it’s real, then this is certainly banned in China.”<\/p>\n
I found this case to be really interesting because although it seems to be for a good cause, the scientist in question is under a lot of fire from his colleagues. Additionally, no one seems to be aware of how this could have happened, since no hospital or program He works with seems to have known of his experiments. It is definitely suspicious that he has been on leave from his job without pay for almost a year! I think that it is positive that there is hope for future disease-preventing innovations in genetics, yet it seems like a really bad idea to me that this scientist would randomly begin testing on living people (and it could lead to another “Pandora’s box”- designer babies). I would definitely be curious to hear whether this was in fact a real experiment, as well as what He has to say for himself during the Summit on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In recent online videos, geneticist He Jiankui defended his recent achievement of embryonic gene editing, which he used on baby twin girls infected with HIV to protect them from the development of AIDS. This experimentation has caused alarm throughout the Chinese scientific community after investigations suggest that its ethical approval may have been forged. In an open letter, over 100… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2484,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions\/2484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/eastasiaandoceaniablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}