HIV Researchers Slam The Scientist Who Made Genetically Engineered Babies
By Nidhi Subbaraman,
BuzzFeed
| 11. 26. 2018
“I’m angry on behalf of the genetic engineering community. I’m angry on behalf of the HIV community,” one expert said. The researchers said that existing methods already offer parents simple ways to have children without transmitting the disease.
HIV researchers are incensed that the first reported use of gene editing in human embryos was aimed at conferring HIV immunity, criticizing the move as reckless and unnecessary.
The Associated Press reported Sunday that twin girls Lulu and Nana were born after a team led by He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, edited their genes when they were days-old embryos. Their father reportedly had HIV, and the procedure wiped out a gene that is usually necessary for the virus to infect cells. The news, first reported by MIT Technology Review, broke before the scientist had published any of his data, and was accompanied by YouTube videos in which He described his work.
Genetics experts immediately criticized the project as premature and said it risked conferring dangerous mutations to the twins.
Adding to that chorus, HIV researchers told BuzzFeed News that such a procedure doesn’t make sense for preventing HIV. Targeting and knocking out a single gene, as He claimed to do, does not offer resistance against all strains of the virus. What’s more,... see more
Related Articles
By Fiona Harvey, The Guardian | 01.06.2021
By Jeffrey Mervis, Science | 01.06.2021
Low-income commuters who rely on public transit face many challenges—multiple transfers, long waits, and off-hour travel—that aren’t measured in the usual ridership surveys. Vanessa Frias-Martinez, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park, wants to ease their commute...
By Sharon Begley, STAT | 01.06.2021
Biologists tend not to discuss experimental results on a handful of cells and a single solitary mouse — too preliminary, too sketchy. David Liu of the Broad Institute therefore had no plans to present such findings, which he’d peeked at...
By Gwen D’Arcangelis, Guest Contributor
| 01.07.2021
Photo by Adrian Lange on Unsplash
Living under the COVID-19 pandemic has justifiably created fear and uncertainty about germs and their evolving contagiousness and lethality. Against the backdrop of the natural evolution of the coronavirus and emerging new strains, many ruminate over further alarming scenarios—from questions about the coronavirus’s possible lab origins, to worry over the possibility of biohackers engineering new pandemic germs. New gene editing technologies like CRISPR make these scenarios all the more frightening, as they...