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A disgraced Chinese scientist who was jailed for genetically editing human babies reveals he has returned to genetics research.
He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison in 2019 after announcing that he had created the first genome-edited babies.
Now, just two years away from prison, Dr. He has revealed that he has opened three new laboratories to continue genetic experiments on human embryos.
Dr. He told the Japanese newspaper. Mainichi Shimbun that he had no intention of creating more genome-edited children.
Despite his arrest, he maintains that he is “proud” of his past work, stating, “Society will eventually accept it.”
He Jiankui (pictured at a 2023 press conference) announced that he has returned to the lab after being imprisoned for genetically editing human babies.
Dr. He says he intends to develop gene editing techniques for the treatment of rare diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and familial Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite his arrest and fierce criticism from the scientific community, he has opened three new research laboratories in Beijing and Wuhan.
This follows an earlier attempt to restart his research in Hong Kong during which Dr He said he had obtained a visa under the island’s new talent scheme.
However, Hong Kong authorities revoked his visa less than a day after his announcement, claiming that Dr He had “made false statements” during his application.
Gene editing of human embryos has been banned in China since 2003, but the procedure is allowed for purely non-reproductive purposes.
Dr. He insists that his work will conform to the limitations of Chinese law and that he will no longer attempt to produce live, gene-edited human children.
“We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both national and international standards,” he says.
In November 2018, Dr. He shocked the scientific community when he announced that he had produced two genetically modified human babies.
In 2018, He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genes of human babies in an attempt to make them resistant to HIV.
Dr He told an international genetics conference in Hong Kong that he had modified the genes of twin girls, nicknamed ‘Lulu’ and ‘Nana’, to make them resistant to HIV.
Between 2016 and 2018, He modified the genes of embryos belonging to eight couples in which only the father was HIV positive.
Using a gene editing technique called Crispr-Cas9, he rewrote sections of the embryos’ DNA with the aim of preventing transmission of the virus.
He later revealed that a third gene-edited girl had also been born from these experiments.
Following his announcement, Dr. He was immediately arrested and tried by Chinese authorities for “illegally carrying out genetic editing of human embryos intended for reproduction.”
According to Dr. He, the twins are now five years old and both attend kindergarten.
Dr. He, along with two of his colleagues who were also sentenced, faced fierce ethical criticism for their experiments.
Dr. He (pictured in his lab in 2018) says he is proud of his research and that society will “eventually accept” human genome editing.
It was alleged that he unnecessarily went ahead with the risky and unnecessary treatment without proper consent of the parents involved to seek fame and personal gains.
During the trial, Dr. He was also found to have falsified documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for his experiments.
While Dr. He admits that his research was “too hasty,” he has always maintained that his work was for the benefit of society.
It says: ‘The results of the analysis of complete genetic sequences (from the children) show that there were no modifications to the genes other than for the medical purpose, providing evidence that the genome editing was safe.
“I am proud to have helped families who wanted to have healthy children.”
WHAT IS CRISPR-CAS9?
Crispr-Cas9 is a tool for making precise edits to DNA, discovered in bacteria.
The acronym stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats.”
The technique involves an enzyme that cuts the DNA and a small tag that tells the enzyme where to cut.
The CRISPR/Cas9 technique uses tags that identify the location of the mutation and an enzyme, which acts like small scissors, to cut DNA at a precise location, allowing small portions of a gene to be removed.
By editing this tag, scientists can direct the enzyme to specific regions of the DNA and make precise cuts, wherever they want.
It has been used to “silence” genes, effectively turning them off.
When the cellular machinery repairs the DNA break, it removes a small piece of DNA.
In this way, researchers can precisely disable specific genes in the genome.
The approach has previously been used to edit the HBB gene responsible for a condition called β-thalassemia.