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Last November, Chinese geneticist He Jiankui challenged the laws of his country, and no doubt his ethical responsibilities, by genetically altering binoculars while they were embryos.
He believed that he was protecting them from HIVbut he may have condemned them to an untimely death.
Images courtesy: Reuters
He was experimenting with the editing of human embryos in order to alter human beings so that they develop immunity against HIV. But new data has shown that he could have inadvertently created a genetic mutation similar to an existing called CCR5. And this is responsible for reducing the lives of people on average 1.9 years.
"It's clearly a mutation of quite powerful effect," said Berkeley, a population geneticist at the University of California, at the MIT Technology Review. He says he made this discovery by studying the DNA and deaths of 400,000 people in the British gene database Biobank. "You can not have a lot of mutations doing that, or you would not live that long." This is not all either. In February, the same gene was also linked to memory recovery after stroke, which means that it could also be related to brain function.
The new discovery once again highlights why, even though CRISPR has been around for so many years, it has not been tested on humans yet. Not before it in any case. That's because genes are not ponies in one turn. Almost every genetic mutation is linked to multiple different effects on a person. And that's only an estimate, because we have not yet identified them all.
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"Changing the germ line based on a partial understanding is not responsible," says Feng Zhang, a biologist at MIT and CRISPR expert. "This is another piece of information for which we should not be so careless."
For his problems, he was summarily arrested after his proclamation and imprisoned. Due to China's strict laws against the editing of human genes, it could even incur the death penalty.
And frankly, it was the right call to stop him. Often scientists can be so enamored of their theories that they do not consider the side effects of their work. This is exactly why the authorities exist to oversee this type of research, to limit this type of experiments on human beings until they are absolutely certain that the risks are at least minimal.
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