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At the end of 2018, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, did a job that earned him not only the criticism of his peers, but also the reproach of the government of his country. He has taken an extraordinary step in making genetic modifications to human embryos with the intention of bringing them to term. The work resulted in a pair of newborns, marking the beginning of a new, potentially dangerous era of genetic experimentation.
The decision to genetically modify babies has been firmly decried by other players in the field of genetics, and a new article has been published in Nature Medicine suggests that the changes that he made to both children could sentence them to an early death.
The genetic modification made by He was intended to make twin girls resistant to the AIDS virus. To do this, he modified their CCR5 gene, but it is not known if the risk was worth the presumed penalty.
the Nature The study looked at the overall mortality of about 400,000 people, and the researchers focused on people born with a natural variation of CRC5. The team discovered that the life expectancy of patients carrying the CCR5 mutation was actually shorter, and scientists believe that they know why.
It is thought that CCR5 plays a role not only in the susceptibility of a person to the AIDS virus, but also in other diseases, including the flu. Researchers now believe that the overall increase in mortality is probably related to a higher probability of dying from another illness such as the flu. Overall, the team found that people with the CCR5 mutation were more than 20% more likely to die before age 76 than those with the CCR5 mutation.
"There are many reasons not to create CRISPR babies at this stage. And one of them is the fact that we can not really predict the effect of the mutations we induce, "said Rasmus Nielsen, lead author of the study. NPR in a report.
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