- On Sunday, news reports indicated that the first gene-edited human babies had been born in China. As of right now, the information on what, exactly, has been accomplished is confusing. The scientist behind the announcement has made a variety of claims but has not submitted his data to the community in order for his claims to be verified. But even in its current state, the announcement has set off a firestorm of criticism within the scientific and ethics communities. Most scientists feel that the technology isn't ready for use in humans and that there are better ways to deal with the problem the work was addressing: HIV infection.
- Compounding matters are indications that the loss of CCR5 leaves individuals at heightened risk of infection from other viruses, including West Nile. So, rather than simply eliminating a risk, the work here seems to involve exchanging risks.
Or that would be the case if He had limited his work to instances in which the editing was successful. He claims that a pair of twins were born following the editing procedure (other couples tried but have not yet brought a baby to term). But the AP showed data obtained from He to a number of scientists, who indicated at least one of the twins born was a mosaic—editing took place after the embryo started cell divisions, making that individual a patchwork of edited and unedited cells.
"In that child, there really was almost nothing to be gained in terms of protection against HIV, and yet you're exposing that child to all the unknown safety risks," Kiran Musunuru of the University of Pennsylvania told the AP. Harvard's George Church suggested that the "main emphasis was on testing editing rather than avoiding this disease." That's consistent with He's video, linked above, in which he describes the need for this editing for treating incurable genetic diseases—something that doesn't describe this work.
Wow! I'm thankful that the threshold for the death penalty is markedly higher here in the states. I'm not sure I ever want to travel to China.
I personally know the American scientist involved (not mentioned in this article), and I'm kinda shocked right now.
If you know the person involved, do you also know the reason why China decided to make gene edited babies? What is their point? Does this have anything to do with their plans of starting an all out war if things didn't go their way? Is this why they suddenly employed High School graduates to manufacture AI killer weapons for them? Do they plan to use these gene edited babies as super soldiers? There's so many questions!
I doubt that the Chinese government (i.e. China itself) has had much to do with it until a few days ago, when this story broke. I'm not sure what are laws are on human gene editing in China, but the Chinese government's response to this will be fairly telling. There's an arms race of sorts to gain an advantage in CRISPR, and it's going to be a huge market when the technology is improved enough to meet regulatory measures. China would love it if a Chinese company could corner that market. So maybe the researchers involved in this felt like they took a calculated risk with pushback from the scientific community and legal consequences, but even if their CRISPR'ing was perfect, the necessity of this particular genetic editing sounds questionable, at best. On the one hand, I'd love to hasten progress on CRISPR. It's a game changer for humans if we can learn to harness it. In the future, we might even criminalize not editing an individual's genome identified as possessing bad mutations (cancer, retardation, multiple sclerosis, etc.). People might opt for in vitro fertilization almost all of the time. There might be laws against editing humans to be smarter, stronger, or other enhancements, though. It'll be an interesting legal minefield.
That is the crux of it. If it was like "yeah we found out that the embryo does indeed have HIV and tried to fix it", that's different than attempting to encode a specific mutation that has both desirable and undesirable traits to fix a problem that wasn't likely to occur in the first place. Parental consent be damned, sometimes I don't even think people should be allowed to play the lottery.
Probably not the first, the tech has been out there for a while so likely someone has done this before for private clients in a private lab. Same with human cloning. If you are rich enough to do this you don’t go blabbering to the media about it and you pay everyone to stay quiet for many years