Scottish Daily Mail

‘Monstrous’ dawn of the geneticall­y modif ied babies

- By Victoria Allen Science Correspond­ent

BRITISH scientists have condemned a ‘monstrous’ experiment that is said to have created the world’s first geneticall­y edited babies in China.

Dr He Jiankui said he made twins incapable of being infected by HIV by disabling the CCR5 gene that allows the deadly virus to get into human cells.

He claims to have done this in two girls, named Nana and Lulu, who were born in China a few weeks ago, although the research has not been published or independen­tly verified.

Doing this in living babies is illegal in many countries, including the UK, where scientists and ethicists accused the researcher of ‘highly irresponsi­ble, unethical and dangerous’ science, akin to ‘genetic Russian roulette’.

People without the CCR5 gene may be protected from HIV but are at greater risk from other viruses, including hepatitis B and West Nile virus, as well as dying of flu.

Experts say gene editing also puts babies in greater danger of severe birth defects and cancer.

Dr He, from Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, recruited HIV-positive men and their partners for fertility treatment, offering to protect their children from the virus. The chances of a father passing on HIV are close to zero when the mother is not infected.

Couples were given fertility treatment, with the gene-editing CRISPRCas9 protein injected into the mother’s egg with the sperm. This acts like molecular scissors to ‘snip out’ the CCR5 gene that triggers a protein to allow HIV into cells.

Dr He said 16 out of 22 embryos were edited, and 11 were used in six IVF attempts before a woman became pregnant with her twins.

In Britain gene editing has been done in the laboratory but never on an embryo transplant­ed into a woman to make her pregnant.

Dr He’s experiment, revealed yesterday before an internatio­nal gene editing conference in Hong Kong, was described as ‘monstrous’ by Professor Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford.

He said: ‘It contravene­s decades of ethical consensus and guidelines on the protection of human participan­ts in research. In many other places in the world this would be illegal, punishable by imprisonme­nt.

‘These healthy babies are being used as genetic guinea pigs. This is genetic Russian roulette.’

Dr Dusko Ilic, from the faculty of life sciences and medicine at King’s Colwhich

‘They should face criminal trial’

lege London, said: ‘These people should face criminal trial – they were experiment­ing with children’s lives with no reason for doing it.

‘Gene editing technology is not perfect and… can cause birth defects, from spina bifida to learning disabiliti­es, and could create genetic diseases we have never even heard of before.’

Professor Robert Winston, emeritus professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London, said: ‘This is an experiment likely to go wrong as CRISPR-Cas9 is not reliable and there may be effects, physical and mental, could be devastatin­g. Worse still, this opens the way to genetic enhancemen­t for desirable characteri­stics. It should be condemned.’

The fear over gene editing is that the CRISPR-Cas9, made up of a homing molecule and a ‘scissor’ protein to cut DNA, can zero in on the wrong part, raising the risk of other illnesses by introducin­g genetic mutations.

However, Dr He’s team claimed cells removed from the resulting embryos, and the babies when they were born, show the gene editing worked safely.

In a promotiona­l video, Dr He compared his work, previously done in animals, to the early years of IVF when the world’s first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in the UK in 1978.

The researcher, who has two genetics firms, said: ‘The same fears then are repeated now. Yet IVF unquestion­ably has benefited families. There will be no question about the morality of gene surgery in 20 to 30 years.’

The university where he works said it was ‘deeply shocked’ by the conduct of Dr He, who had been on unpaid leave since February and would continue to be until January 2021. It said an independen­t committee would be formed to investigat­e his work, which ‘has seriously violated academic ethics and codes of conduct’.

WHILE sentencing guidelines explicitly making it clear that judges must consider the impact of a crime on the victim are welcome, a question. Why has it taken so long to implement what should always have been a basic tenet of sentencing?

The answer lies, of course, in a ten-year campaign of soft justice as the SNP for ever chased trendy notions and, entirely wrongly, put criminals and not their victims at the heart of the system.

There is a welcome too for another belated piece of guideline advice which will mean judges should, where possible, order offenders to repair some of the harm their crimes have done.

Contrast this with previous woolly thinking from the Nationalis­ts which suggested thugs should not be called ‘offenders’ lest it stigmatise them.

Yes, the changes are welcome but the reality remains that Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf still has much work to do to close the gap between what the public expect from justice and what the SNP’s modish policies deliver.

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