A return to the planet of superbabies

ANNOUNCEMENT ... IS GENE-EDITING OF A HUMAN ORGANISM. — COLBY COSH

AChinese scientist set the world on its ear Sunday by claiming that his laboratory has produced the first live-born humans to have been fertilized with edited inheritable genes. He Jiankui, a U.S.educated geneticist at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, said proudly in a video press release that twins “Lulu” and “Nana” “came crying into the world as healthy as any other babies two weeks ago.”

The children were not depicted, and few other details about them were given, but He says that when the pair was still one lone cell, he used so-called CRISPR gene editing technology to give them the delta-32 variant of the CCR5 gene on their third chromosome. If the babies really exist, this technically makes them genetically engineered mutants — with the intended consequence of making them highly resistant to HIV infection.

I published a column here about human genetic engineering 11 days ago: my quick return to the subject should suggest how quickly things are moving nowadays. The technology I was discussing back in that distant era was the concept, still hypothetical, of applying genetic scoring methods to the selection of in-vitro human embryos for implantation into mothers.

It was not an article about gene editing. I was only observing what every geneticist knows, which is that IVF doctors create many embryos before attempting to implant one; that strong techniques for guessing what complex polygenic traits will emerge from an embryo’s gene sequence are now available; and that fertility doctors could make this information available to parents fairly inexpensively.

In other words, I was describing a quite homely, unobtrusive form of eugenics, one with minimal social consequences or likelihood of disaster. Couples having IVF babies might at least, and might as well, choose which egg they want to try first from the carton, so to speak. Probably nobody would have too much ethical trouble with this idea. The screening of fetuses for genetic disorders — with the implication that some pregnancies may be voluntarily terminated — is already routine medicine.

Dr. He’s announcement, which nobody in the wider scientific world is too sure right now whether to believe, is another ballgame: it is gene-editing of a human organism. CRISPR — which should already probably be treated by writers and editors like the word “radar” — is shorthand for the “CRISPR/Cas9” technique that allows for arbitrarily fine changes to a genetic sequence.

It is, basically, like having a keyboard for genetic code. You can “backspace” over a series of nucleotide bases you don’t like, enter new “letters,” and have the new genome injected into a cell. Crispr-editing was demonstrated in 2012, and despite occasional doubts, the concept has mostly held up. It has been shown to work in human embryos which were not implanted, and some adult humans are now having their genes experimentally altered with the goal of preventing inherited diseases like beta thalassemia.

The hitherto existing consensus, however, has been that scientists ought to be pretty sure what they are doing before they start creating Crispr babies to order. Those same scientists, however, have been equally sure that someone would try it soon — if only to have the reward of doing it first. And if you asked them, they would all bet that this “someone” would be in China.

The outlaw He seems to have gone beyond the obvious notion of eliminating an obviously harmful known gene variant, perhaps because the CCR5 gene is a technically attractive, Crisprfriendly target. The babyediting seems to have been done under the cover of HIV research, which seems a tad nonsensical, and allegedly had the approval of an ethicist. (In retrospect, this seems like the most predictable feature of rogue humangene editing: that the elaborate ethics-cop systems which now torment medical researchers everywhere would fail under pressure from one fellow trying to barge into the Guinness Book.)

One hopes that the ethics adviser was properly apprised that the delta-32 mutation, although beneficial for HIV prevention, may increase susceptibility to other viral infections. Delta-32 also protects against smallpox, which is probably how it gained a foothold in nature, so little Lulu and Nana do have that going for them.

Nobody can be certain what the long-term health consequences of this Crisprizing will be. (One obvious problem: “natural” delta-32 occurs mostly in European populations, and its interaction with a Chinese genomic background may be unpredictable.) If Lulu and Nana are real, their fate will be watched by an anxious world for decades. In the meantime, the most important consequence of He’s experiment may be to dispel the notion of China as a sort of lawless scientific Wild East where humane instincts and precautionary principles mean nothing.

In polling and online discussions, ordinary Chinese people seem to display the same range of attitudes to gene engineering that Westerners typically do: they’re against it for “enhancement” or “designer babies” but open to the idea of eliminating or mitigating inheritable disease. In the meantime, He’s announcement has been greeted with a chorus of outrage. It was immediately denounced by the SUSTech biology department and by other Chinese scholars, who called upon the law to intervene. The right of a scientist to defy convention and ignore social opprobrium is recognized as important in the Western world, even if we wouldn’t tolerate designer babies. As a principle, scientific freedom seems less likely to receive a hearing in China under circumstances of blazing controversy, not more.