He Jiankui is an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. He did not break any international regulations but CRISPR editing of human embryos was a break with convention.
“There’s a fairly tight consensus from what is and is not acceptable in genome editing as of now, and He’s reported work represents a departure from that,” said David R. Liu, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, who has pioneered improving versions of CRISPR.
He JianKu’s Talk Starts at 1 Hour and Nine Minutes of This Video of the Hong Kong Human Gene Editing Conference
He speaks in english. He starts with an apology about the story leaking before it was presented at scientific venue.
He describes the work with monkeys and humans.
He describes that HIV-Aids is still a top ten cause of death in many countries. Some African countries have 0.5 to 2.5% infection rates for HIV in the early ages.
Cord Blood and other testing was performed with 30X genome sequencing in different spots. They confirmed in many spots and tissues that there was no system-wide off targets. There were some tiny amounts of off-targets detected which suggested some mosaics or cell amplification effects.
The work looks solid and will be followed up with testing until the children reach 18 years of age. The adult children will then need to consent for any continued testing.
There is another paper that the CCR5 gene could have cognition enhancement effects. He JianKu said he is against enhancement. However, theoretically it is possible this was a minor first intelligence enhancement gene editing. This was about 1:32-1:35 in the video which was showing a question in the interview portion of the presentation.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Scientists love to ignore the law of unintended consequences and now it can effect the entire planet. These guys have no real ethics just self contentedness.
Scientists cannot ignore “the law of unintended consequences”.