Genetic Engineering in the Press by GEG

He Jiankui refused to answer researchers’ questions about his controversial 2018 experiments at weekend event. 

The Chinese scientist who helped create the world's first gene-edited babies has been sentenced to three years in prison.

“The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” says Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab uncovered a major new role for the CCR5 gene in memory and the brain’s ability to form new connections. 

“The simplest interpretation is that those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins,” says Silva. He says the exact effect on the girls’ cognition is impossible to predict, and “that is why it should not be done.” 

In what would represent a dramatic and ethically fraught escalation of CRISPR research, a scientist from a university in Shenzhen, China claims he has succeeded in helping create the world’s first genetically-edited babies. Jiankui He told the Associated Press that twin girls were born earlier this month after he edited their embryos using CRISPR technology to remove the CCR5 gene, which plays a critical role in enabling many forms of the HIV virus to infect cells.

In 2018, biophysicist He Jiankui shocked the world when he announced that he had used the CRISPR genome editing technique to modify implanted embryos and led to the birth of two children. The genomes of the girls were modified to induce HIV resistance. Just after the egg was fertilized, the scientists injected CRISPR Cas 9 reagents into the fertilized egg. They wanted to make targeted genetic modifications, the goal was that this would lead to people who would be resistant or even immune to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The genetic modification was supposed to deactivate a protein that acts as a kind of molecular door handle for HIV. According to Nature Biotechnology, his toddlers are now healthy. Researchers are investigating how the changes to the girls' genomes might result in health benefits or risks, how their condition might be monitored, given He's imprisonment and the closure of his lab, and how other researchers might ethically study the genetically altered girls.

The research, published in June 2019 in Nature Medicine1, had suggested that people with two copies of a natural genetic mutation that confers HIV resistance are at an increased risk of dying earlier than other people. It was conducted in the wake of controversial experiments by the Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who had attempted to recreate the effects of this mutation in the gene CCR5 by using the CRISPR gene-editing tool in human embryos. The twin girls born last year as a result of the work did not end up carrying this exact mutation, but the research attracted attention because of its potential relevance to such experiments.

Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who claimed to have helped make the world's first gene-edited babies, said he was “proud” of his work when speaking at a genome conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday. He claimed his widely-criticized research aimed at helping children resist possible future HIV contraction. (Video  of Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing)