Chinese investigators have determined that the doctor behind the reported birth of two babies whose genes had been edited in hopes of making them resistant to the AIDS virus acted on his own and will be punished for any violations of the law, a state media report said on Monday, 21 January.
Investigators in the southern province of Guangdong determined Dr He Jiankui organised and handled funding for the experiment without outside assistance in violation of national guidelines, the Xinhua News Agency said.
It didn't say which laws He might have violated but said he had fabricated an ethical review by others.
Then little-known, He attended an elite meeting in Berkeley, California, in 2017 where scientists and ethicists were discussing a technology that had shaken the field to its core an emerging tool for "editing" genes, the strings of DNA that form the blueprint of life.
He embraced the tool, called CRISPR, and last year rocked an international conference with the claim that he had helped make the world's first gene-edited babies , despite a clear scientific consensus that making genetic changes that could be passed to future generations should not be attempted at this point.
In China, ministerial guidelines prohibit embryo research that "violates ethical or moral principles." The chief of the World Health Organization said last year his agency is assembling experts to consider the health impact of gene editing.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said gene editing "cannot be just done without clear guidelines" and experts should "start from a clean sheet and check everything."
"We have a big part of our population who say, 'Don't touch,'" Tedros told reporters. "We have to be very, very careful, and the working group will do that."
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