Yesterday a news item appeared in the media that will bring a queue: He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher, had been able to genetically modify newborn babies so that they were immune to the HIV virus. The international response was not long in coming and the scientific community raised an uproar. Today we learned new details about this controversial case: the investigator had been suspended from his position at the university since February.
The South China University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen has not hesitated to issue an official statement after yesterday's bombing. In it he assures that the teacher He Jiankui was suspended from employment and salary since last February 1 and that his incorporation into the institution is not scheduled until January 2021. It is not clear, however, the exact reasons for this suspension at the beginning of the year and if it was related to his intentions to experiment with modified embryos (we imagine so).
As you probably already know, He Jiankui has become famous overnight for being able to modify the genes of some embryos that have resulted in the birth of twin girls, Lulu and Nana, immune to the HIV virus that causes AIDS, or what is the same: the creation of the first genetically modified babies of our history.
To do this, the researcher would have used the CRISPR tool, which allows DNA editing with the introduction of new genes or the deletion of others. In the specific case of these babies, what has supposedly been done is to disable the CCR5 gene -responsible for the HIV virus passing into the cells- to make them resistant to infection.
The experiment has not been verified at any time or published in any scientific journal, but the scientific community has positioned itself totally against this procedure. Gene modification at this level is illegal in many countries, including China, where this study is considered to have violated the principles of biomedical ethics, making a experiment with humans that it does not have 100% secure guarantees and that exposes them to still unknown risks.
He Jiankui, for his part, defends himself by pointing, according to Associated Press, that his genetic modification work was only looking for protect babies from future HIV infection, virus that in fact the father of the creatures has - the mother is not infected. These embryos are not the only ones that have participated in the Jiankui procedure: six more couples undergoing fertility treatment, in which the man is also HIV positive, volunteers have volunteered for this modification of their embryos.
The debate is on the table. Until now, a large part of the scientific community has been in favor of gene editing whenever it seeks to cure and treat diseases that are already present. In the case at hand, however, the babies did not have AIDS; they have been modified at will so that they never suffer from it, altering part of their genes and making them more "resistant and strong" than other humans. The implications of such an action are almost impossible to imagine.