‘They Will Be Studied for the Rest of Their Lives.’ How China’s Gene-Edited Twins Could Be Forever Changed By Controversial CRISPR Work

For now, they’re known as Lulu and Nana, pseudonyms that are meant to give them some amount of anonymity amid the international uproar over their birth. As the first babies born after their genomes were edited (while they were embryos, by the genetics tool CRISPR) the twin girls, born in Shenzhen, China are the subject of scientific and public scrutiny that will only escalate as they get older. He Jiankui, a professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, stunned the world when he claimed, both in a video posted by his lab and in an interview with a journalist, that he used CRISPR to disable a gene involved in helping HIV to enter healthy cells. By doing so, he gave the resulting edited embryos, including the twin girls, resistance to the virus. Doing so means He violated current guidelines prohibiting using CRISPR on human embryos for pregnancy. For now, He’s claims are only claims, since he has not published his work in a scientific journal for others to review and validate. While he did present his findings at a conference a few days after his YouTube announcement, researchers can only take the data at face value. He says he plans to publish the data, but now that the report has been released to the public, it’s difficult to predict which journals would accept the manuscript. The Chinese researcher’s university denied knowledge of his experiment and said that He has been on leave since last February. Chinese authorities have now su...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized crispr Genetics healthytime onetime Source Type: news