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SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4 News) – A Chinese researcher claimed that he was genetically modified for the first time. He says that binoculars born earlier this month have been genetically engineered to resist HIV infection. Scientists around the world are furious, claiming that the actions of this researcher are unethical.
David Grunwald, professor of human genetics at the University of Utah, said: "There is no surprise in the scientific community if we have the technology to make these changes, I think that we were very surprised that someone plans to implement them. "
Chinese researcher He Jiankui at Southern Univ. Of Science and Technology in Shenzhen claims to have used CRISPR technology to genetically modify twins. CRISPR is essentially a bacterium capable of extracting a specific gene from a long strand of DNA and then replacing the cut with a foreign segment or allowing the strand to heal naturally.
At the University of Utah, researchers use CRISPR to study osteoarthritis. Grunwald explained: "We have discovered a gene that we believe allows people to become very sensitive to osteoarthritis, and we want to ask if this gene is sufficiently different to explain their susceptibility to disease. designed mice that have exactly the same change in their genome as those people who suffer from this disease. "
Grunwald said that genetically modified human beings should not have been considered at this early stage of research. "Scientists and nations unanimously responded that it was impossible that an individual could or could be allowed to design an experiment on human beings.What we learned from the Holocaust, from the trials of Nuremberg, it is that we must be very careful about the implementation of experiments on human beings, we must pay close attention to monitoring, we must ensure that we can give informed consent to people on the manner in which they will be performed, when they are experiments. None of these guidelines has been followed with respect to this particular case. "
Grunwald said that this technology would become more and more accessible to dishonest scientists and that it was time for communities to get involved in creating a regulatory policy.
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