2018

Ignoring international guidelines, e.g., of the National Academy of Sciences), a 34-year-old publicity-obsessed Chinese researcher, He Jiankui used a CRISPR gene edit to take out the receptor gene for HIV (CCR5) in healthy human embryos. Two twin girls who had received the gene edit were born normally in early November, though it came to light that unwanted off-target gene edits had been made and that both embryos had been mosaics (i.e., had begun cell division before the gene edit), so that some of the resulting cells in the babies were unedited. The international uproar was played out at the Hong Kong conference (Issacson,310-311, 315ff.). Doudna “was appalled at what Jiankui had done, because it was premature and unnecessary as a medical procedure and a grandstanding act that could spark a backlash against all gene-editing.” Yet, the conference statement she issued with Baltimore, et al., sought to steer “a middle course,” as she “wanted to pave the way to making it safer to do so. . . . So the statement that Doudna, Baltimore, and the other organizers crafted was very restrained” (323-324).