this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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He was found guilty of medical malpractice after gene editing babies by treating their embryos with CRISPR/Cas9. He claims that he was trying to make them resistant to HIV, and that medical ethics are preventing cures from being discovered, but his critics say that we know CRISPR is too unreliable to use on a genome the size of a human's, and is more likely to introduce dangerous mutations than apply the intended change, hence why no one else has done this before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui
So why is he allowed to work in this field again? Seems wild
His assistants weren't though
Making them resistant to HIV. How does he test it whether they actually are...?
Sequence them; he was bashing in a gene that we already know conveys HIV resistance (but not complete immunity), the ∆32 mutation. If sequencing shows that the babies have the mutation, and also don't have any other negative mutations as a result of the experiment, then it was successful.
That 'and also' is the hard one to be sure about.
My understanding is that they were embryos from HIV infected parents, so they had very little chance of avoiding infection during birth. His argument is that their chances of survival were already so low, there's little harm that could be done if the treatment wasn't effective.
I feel the need to point out that almost no babies get HIV from their mother as long as the mother is being successfully treated with anti retroviral medication.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of the circumstances. It puts stuff in a different perspective.
The linked Wikipedia article says only their fathers were HIV-positive, and typically that wouldn't lead to a parent infecting their child unless they decided to share needles etc.
"I need a human baby" is a very difficult sentence to start a conversation with. I don't blame him for avoiding that awkward proposal.
Better to ask forgiveness than permission!
The ethics board does not approve the message.
Ok, but, does it really not work, or like, it's just that you would have to run it in a batch and kill the bad cells, which could be unethical on human embryos?
Like, could we grow legs on a lungfish (which Google says has a larger genome than humans) using CRISPR-cas9 if we did not care about botched embryos?
You'd need to test every cell in the embryo to be sure none of them had off-target mutations, and DNA sequencing doesn't leave the cell alive, so you can't prove it worked without killing the embryo. He tested some of the cells and discarded embryos where those cells were damaged, but there's no way to know if the untested cells in the embryos were fine, and given what we know about the reliability, it's more likely that there are problems than not.
yea he was the chinese dude, doing unsanctioned/unethical sciences, which probably dint work nor his paper would be published anyways.