25 February 2022
How to protect the first ‘CRISPR babies’ prompts ethical debate
In 2018, the world learned that He had implanted embryos in which he had used
CRISPR–Cas9 to edit a gene known asCCR5, which encodes an HIV co-receptor,with the goal of making them resistant to the virus. The implantation led to the birth of twins in 2018, and a third child was later born to separate parents. The parents had agreed to the treatment because the fathers were HIV-positive and the mothers were HIV-negative, and the couples were barred from access to alternative assisted-reproduction technologies in China.
In December 2019, He was sentenced to three years in prison. Sources close to him say that he should be released soon. Qiu says he might be assigned a research position.
Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia, who has written a book on human genome-editing1, agrees that He should shoulder some responsibility for the children. He promised that they would receive health insurance for the first 18 years of their lives, but because the twins were born prematurely, they were initially denied coverage, which He initially stepped in to pay, according to Kirksey’s investigations. He and the university should make good on promises of medical assistance, Kirksey says.
The children, who are now toddlers, are the only known children with edited genomes. It is possible that others have been born since, but Qiu says that this is unlikely to have happened in China, where researchers would have been deterred by He’s harsh punishment. “No scientist will dare to further cross the line,” he says.
But other researchers have stated their interest in implanting genome-edited embryos, including Denis Rebrikov, a molecular biologist and geneticist at the Kulakov National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology in Moscow. He has developed a technique to use CRISPR to edit mutations in a gene linked to deafness, called GJB2, but he has yet to implant a genome-edited embryo owing to a lack of interest among deaf couples in Russia. “I am sure that sooner or later we will find a couple who want to give birth to a hearing child,” says Rebrikov. When he does, he plans to edit the embryos and store them before requesting permission from Russian regulatory bodies to implant them.
The three children in China “will not be the last” babies with edited genomes, says Ayo Wahlberg, an anthropologist specializing in reproductive technologies at the University of Copenhagen.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00512-w