Experience: genetically modified to resist HIV

"Lulu" and "Nana" are two girls born "several weeks ago". They are perfectly healthy to the joy of their mother, Grace, and their father, Mark. The novelty of the case is that He jiankui, a Chinese scientist, claims to have created the first two genetically modified babies to resist the virus that causes AIDS.

The expert and his team used the gene editing technique known as Crispr to transform a gene and make girls resistant to HIV. He Jiankui is a researcher at the Chinese University of Science and Technology South (Sustech). Sustech herself declared herself "deeply shocked" by the scientist's announcement.

The Academic Committee "believes that He Jiankui's behavior of using Crispr / Cas9 to edit human embryos was a breach of academic ethics and codes of conduct." The university will set up an independent committee to investigate this incident and will publish its results to the public.

In an official statement, the university center stated that He Jiankui's research had not been communicated to the university or the biology department, who were not aware of the project and its nature.

Without official authorization

The research was not published in any specialized scientific journal, where it should have been submitted to the badysis of other experts. In addition, Shenzhen's scientific authorities, according to the Beijing News newspaper, said that they had never received the requisite authorization to carry out the test, so they opened an investigation.

The scientist recorded a video in which he smiled as he announced the birth of the Chinese twins. The scientist said that baby's father was carrying the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), responsible for AIDS, and that he had never thought about procreation.

The expert is in Hong Kong, where he will attend a conference on the ethics of genetic manipulation. In the video, she explains that the girls were conceived by artificial insemination.

After fertilization, the scientific team injected into the embryo Crispr reagents, a kind of precision molecular scissors, to inactivate the CCR5 gene. The goal was to modify the gene used by the virus as a gateway to enter the human immune system.

During the development of the embryos, first in the laboratory and then implanted in the womb of their mother, the experts repeatedly verified that everything was going as planned and that the girls did not have any more mutations than expected. To do this, they created sequences of the genetic code of creatures. "No other genes have shown any change," said He Jiankui.

The check was repeated after the birth, originally announced in an exclusive interview with the AP agency and in an article in the MIT Technology Review.

The Chinese geneticist studied in the United States and then returned to China as part of a program to attract internationally trained talent. The expert admits that he is aware of the controversy that his initiative will spark. But, he says, this does not seem to pose ethical problems. All he's done, he says, is "to open an equal chance of having healthy families".