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It would happen sooner or later.
A group of scientists in China claims to have helped bring two genetically modified babies to life. The goal was to change the genes of twins to prevent HIV infection and avoid AIDS. Scientists say they have succeeded, according to reports in the Associated Press and MIT Tech Review.
The claims have not yet been independently verified. But if the researchers really opposed the internationally recognized voluntary guidelines and did what they say, science and bioethics are now entering unknown territory.
What are the news?
The gene editing project was led by He Jiankui, a researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. The twins, named Lulu and Nana, were born of Mark and Grace, who participate in a clinical trial involving seven couples. Men participating in the trials are all HIV-positive, while women are not.
Couples have undergone in vitro fertilization (IVF), in which a sperm is injected into an egg in a petri dish and then, after a few days, a live embryo is planted in the mother's womb. In this case, however, there was a small adjustment. After injecting sperm into the egg, the team injected Crispr-Cas9, a genetic tool that can accurately target and cut a specific gene from 20,000 human genes. In this case, the target was the CCR5 gene. As Quartz has previously reported:
CCR5 is responsible for producing a protein that HIV uses to cling, penetrate and infect a human immune cell. The logic would be that if the CCR5 gene were mutated, the HIV virus would not be able to infect – and thus the mutation would confer resistance to the disease.
In this case, the fathers' HIV infection had already been suppressed with medication, which would have prevented the offspring from carrying the disease. The clinical trial call was intended to show that it may be possible for children to never be infected with the disease during their lifetime. The consent forms signed by participants called the project an "AIDS vaccine development" program, according to the Associated Press.
The trial lasts until March 2019, according to documents on He lab's website. Until now, there has been only one successful pregnancy.
Photo AP / Mark Schiefelbein
What are the claims?
Until recently, scientists who tried to modify the CCR5 gene in human embryos gave poor results. A study conducted in 2016 by a separate group of Chinese researchers allowed genetically modifying only four out of 26 embryos. Even among these, not all copies of the CCR5 gene were altered. Worse still, many embryos have undergone involuntary mutations. None of the embryos were brought to term.
It does not say how many embryos have been tested in their clinical trial so far. What he says in the videos uploaded to YouTube, is that the two genetically modified embryos that were brought to term – namely Lulu and Nana – proceeded as planned. This goes against the 2015 guidelines of the International Summit on the Modification of Human Genes, which concluded that "if, in the research process, the first human embryos … undergo genetic modification, the modified cells should not be used to establish a pregnancy. "
And the statement of It may not be the right one, because the results have not been verified by other scientists. Data from the clinical trial website shows that one of the twin fetuses before birth contains a mixture of differently edited cells, which means that some cells have the ability to resist HIV while others do not do it.
In other videos posted on He's YouTube channel, he says Lulu and Nana are not baby designers. It uses the powerful Crispr gene editing tool only to "heal" families. "If we can help families protect their children, it's inhuman for us not to do it," he says. "We believe that ethics is on our side."
He wrote his own ethical principles for the use of technology, inviting people to debate and comment on:
- Mercy for families in need
- Only for serious diseases, never vanity
- Respect the autonomy of the child
- Genes do not define you
- Everyone deserves the absence of genetic disease
Photo AP / Mark Schiefelbein
What are the reactions of other scientists?
The news of his experience has been widely criticized. Published in 2015, the most recent recommendations on the use of Crispr in humans by the world's leading scientists cautiously support the use of gene modification tools in human embryos, but only in the context of strict research guidelines and without resting of the embryo. When Lulu and Nana were born, he ignored these instructions.
"In this increasingly competitive global quest for applications for gene editing, we hope to be a star," they wrote in a statement of ethics that they had submitted to the year. last, according to the MIT Tech Review.
A group of 100 scientists in China and around the world condemned the research, claiming that his experience had opened Pandora's box. "The approval of bioethics for this so-called" study "was insufficient. We can use the word "crazy" only to describe the experiment conducted directly on human beings, "the statement said. He continued: "As biomedical researchers, we strongly oppose any attempt to modify genes on human embryos without condemning ethics and safety!"
Fyodor Urnov of the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, joins the choir of criticism and expresses at MIT Tech Review "his regret and concern that gene editing – a powerful and useful technique – has been put to use in an environment where it was useless. "
"In cases where the potential risks are considerably higher than the potential benefits, which I think is the case here, it's not ethical," said Kiran Musunuru of the University of Pennsylvania at the Associated Press.
If this is true, the study "would be a premature and reckless intervention for many reasons," tweeted Peter Mills Nuffield Center for Bioethics.
Some were more moderate in their assessment. George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, told The Associated Press that his decision to use gene editing to prevent HIV was justified because of the importance of the disease in the world. But he was not satisfied with the way the study was conducted, especially when the embryo containing only some of the genetically modified cells was also brought to an end.
Feng Zhang, a Broad Institute geneticist and one of the world's leading scientists in the field of Crispr, has been the furthest call for a global moratorium on implanting embryos retained in uteri . "Not only do I consider this risky, but I am also deeply concerned about the lack of transparency surrounding this trial," he said.
And then?
In a sense, what he did the lab should not be surprising. Crispr technology is used so widely that it was inevitable that someone applied it to genetically engineered embryos and drive them to term. The advantage, it is that we know that such an experience has taken place and that it seems open to comments and dialogue. The disadvantage is that it is unclear whether such dialogues will result in a tighter working environment.
Gene editing technologies have the potential to be extremely beneficial for humankind. But there are also significant risks because these modified genes would be passed on to other humans for generations. There is currently no global regulation governing the use of IVF techniques or the genetic modification of human embryos. What exists is a set of guidelines that researchers can accept on a voluntary basis. He clearly ignored these guidelines in his experiments in favor of his own principles. This should not please the scientific community or society in general.
The news of Lulu and Nana comes just one day before the world's most eminent scientists gather in Hong Kong, just minutes away by train from Shenzhen, at the second International Summit on Human Genetic Modification.
"We hope that these series of meetings will provide advice, provide a form of interaction between the scientific community and the general public," Nobel laureate David Baltimore said in a pre-recorded video on the meeting. "We need to come together to agree on what we want to do, how we want to do it, and what we think is right and wrong, on a voluntary basis. We hope that the progress of science will be accessible to the world. "
His study will inevitably be a major topic of discussion. If humans have actually opened Pandora's box, it will be very difficult to close.
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