Scientists ‘went rogue’ and genetically engineered two human babies, or at least claimed to. Here's everything you need to know.

Pedro_P

A sudden and shocking leap forward.
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▼ In the past 24 hours, a story of potentially world-changing import has surfaced. First reported by the MIT Technology Reviewand then not long after by the Associated  Press, who seem to have been sitting on the story for a while, the news that a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui led an unprecedented experiment to edit human embryos and see them carried to term rocked the genetics community. Here’s what you need to know about this evolving story.
The science
Besides He, the most important players in this story may be twin baby girls named Nana and Lulu. As far as we know the twins were  edited as embryos using CRISPR- cas9, a gene editing tool. The stated purpose of the edit was to disable CCR5, a gene involved in allowing HIV to invade cells, which is how a virus infects a host.
The twins don’t appear in a promotional video uploaded to  Youtube by The He Lab, but the scientist himself does. “When Lulu and Nana were just a single cell, this surgery removed the doorway through which HIV enters to infect people,” he says.
In the video, He says his team performed a whole gene sequencing to ascertain if the procedure was successful. “The results indicated the surgery worked safely, as intended,” he says—but that’s not true, according to a scientist who has seen a preliminary version of He’s results and research documentation.
“It’s abominable,” says Kiran Musunuru, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. Musunuru says he’s seen a preliminary version of the paper prepared by He’s team. Musunuru says that the paper he saw shows two major issues with the edited embryos: mosaicism and off-target  mutations.
The circumstances
There’s a reason the international genetics community has ethics  policies in placethat preclude this kind of research being done in secret. In the United States, it’s  illegal to even attempt the sort of  gene editing He usedon a human embryo.
“I don’t want to convey that I’m categorically against [gene editing on embryos] ever being done,” says Musunuru. But in this case—in secrecy and without oversight—he says it’s totally unacceptable. Perhaps the biggest problem, to him, is the fact that the two embryos showed evidence of mosaicism and off-target mutations. Mosaicism is when some of the cells in an organism have a mutation, like the one that He was trying to make, but others do not. Off-target mutations are exactly what they sound like: genetic changes that weren’t the ones intended by the gene edit, potentially introducing congenital diseases or other unforeseen consequences.
If circumstances were different and Musunuru saw embryos in his own lab that had the composition of the ones He’s team reported on, would they be allowed to come to term? “Absolutely not,” says Musunuru. There is too great a possibility that those unintentional genetic tweaks will cause totally unforeseen health problems in the infants, or even in their future progeny. When he saw the promotional video, “I was alternately screaming and crying,” says Musunuru.
Who knew? (▪ ▪ ▪)

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soothsayer

Phew! Wonder what came into existence. Hope no Frankenstein