Lies and disregard for ethical standards
What's wrong with He Jiankui's experiment
Sergey Syrov, XX2 century
The scandalous story of the genetic modification of human embryos in order to immunize them against HIV is far from over. The materials not accepted by Nature and JAMA have fallen into the hands of scientists and journalists, and an article with detailed comments on them has been published in the MIT Technology Review.
Why didn't the scientific community accept He Jiankui's bold experiment?
Critics note that the gene editing of Chinese twins last year, the stated purpose of which was to immunize them against HIV, may not have achieved its goal.
Despite the loud claims of a medical breakthrough that could "curb the HIV epidemic," it is unclear whether the manipulation was successful in terms of the goal set – immunizing children against the virus – because He Jiankui's team did not actually reproduce the gene mutation that creates the desired resistance.
A small percentage of people are born immune to HIV due to a mutation of the CCR5 gene, and it was this gene that had to be edited.
Fedor Urnov, a scientist at The University of California, Berkeley (The University of California, Berkeley), specializing in genome editing, believes:
"The claim that they reproduced a common variant of CCR5 is a blatant distortion of factual data and can only be described by one term: deliberate lies."
Although the team targeted the correct gene, it did not reproduce the required variation of CCR5-Δ32, instead creating new changes whose effects are not clear.
The critical article notes that CRISPR remains an imperfect tool and can lead to undesirable or "inappropriate" changes, which makes its use for editing the human genome extremely controversial.
The authors of the experiment claimed that they were looking for undesirable effects in the early stages of embryo development and found only one – but it is impossible to conduct a truly complete search without examining each of the embryo cells.
Another ethical problem: the parents of the children may have agreed to participate in the experiment under pressure.
The father of the twins is HIV-positive, such people are socially stigmatized in China. It is almost impossible for them to access reproductive health therapy, although a well-proven method known as "sperm washing" prevents the transmission of infection to unborn children.
The lack of access to any kind of reproductive treatment may have prompted parents to take part in the experiment, despite the huge risks.
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