A report of has been confirmed by officials of the Chinese government of the case of two babies whose gene has been edited by a doctor in other for them to be resistant to AIDS.
The gene-editing was reported to have been organised and funded the by Dr. He Jiankui. This gene-editing of the two babies is in violation of the Chinese National guidelines and Dr. He Jiankui is open to a possible prosecution.
Investigators who confirmed the birth of the gene-edited babies has stated that Dr. He Jianku hired a team of foreign staff for the project and he intentionally avoided surveillance and applied technologies whose safety and effectiveness is uncertain in the carrying out human embryo gene-editing activities with the purpose of reproduction which is a practice that is banned by the Chinese government.
The Chinese government described the behaviour of Dr. He Jianku in carrying out a gene-editing practice as a behaviour which seriously violates scientific research integrity and ethics. The behaviour is unacceptable as it is a violation of all relevant regulation of the country and some other countries in the world.
Apart of the twins called Nana and Lulu who were born as a result of the gene-editing experiment, another woman is reportedly carrying still carrying another gene-edited foetus. Dr. He Jianku has been reported to have had five failed attempts to produce gene-edited foetus in the past.
Dr. He Jianku is currently arrested and been guarded in a state-owned apartment in Shenzhen, China. He is currently facing a possible death penalty if convicted of the charges of corruption and bribery being levelled against him by the Chinese government.
Dr. He Jianku in 2017 has claimed in an international scientific conference that he had help make the world’s first gene-edited babies through a gene-editing tool called the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR).
The CRISPR used by Dr. He Jianku is a procedure which there is a scientific consensus against its usage in gene-editing until the procedure is clearly understood by the science world.
