Genetically modified babies: controversy grows and China opens investigation – 11/27/2018

China has ordered the opening of an investigation to verify the claims of a Chinese scientist claiming to have created the first genetically modified babies in history, an act described as "madness" by many researchers.

He Jiankui, a professor at Shenzhen University in Guangdong Province (south), announced Monday in a video posted on YouTube. the birth "a few weeks ago" of two binoculars whose DNA had been modified to make them more resistant to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

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The justification, as He Jiankui himself explains in another video, is that Mark, the father of the twins (Lulu and Nana) is HIV-positive.

"When Mark saw his daughters he said that he never thought that he could be a father and that now he had a reason to live, a reason to work, a goal. Mark has HIV. Discrimination in many developing countries aggravates the virus. Employers fire people like Mark. And doctors often refuse them clinical treatment, "said the Chinese scientist.

However, the Chinese government was quick to react. "We asked the health authorities of Guangdong Province to immediately open a thorough investigation to clarify the facts, "they said Monday night at the National Health Commission, saying that they attach a" great importance "to this issue.

The announcement of He Jiankui caused a wave of criticism of the global scientific community, including the center of the researcher, the University of Science and Technology of the South, who disavowed and declared "deeply shocked".

The geneticist, trained at Stanford University in the United States and who runs a special laboratory on the genome in Shenzhen, explained that he had used the CRISPR / Cas9 technique (also known as "genomic scissors"), which allows you to delete and replace unwanted parts of the genome, as if an error in a computer had been corrected.

The Lulu and Nana twins are born after having been fertilized in vitro from modified embryos, before its implantation in the womb of Grace, his mother.

However, the medical scoop – as it was self-proclaimed – could not be corroborated because the results of the Chinese team have not been published in any scientific journal.

More than 100 Chinese scientists, mainly biologists and doctors, lamented in a statement "a madness", which is" a blow to the global reputation and development of biomedical research in China ".

Source: AFP