Column|After his prison sentence, biophysicist He Jiankui searches for genes affecting Alzheimer’s disease.
Chinese He Jiankui is hardly familiar to Finns as a name. For many geneticists, the name is a curse word.
He will surely go down in history, but as a villain.
Biophysicist He announced in November 2018 that he had removed one gene from each of two human embryos. The twins were born in October 2018.
By removing the gene, children would perhaps avoid being born with the hi virus. The children’s Chinese mother gave her consent for the gene to be removed.
This is how people were born into the world for the first time, whose genetics had been tampered with before birth.
He Jiankui removed the gene rather conveniently with gene scissors. The more scientific name for scissors is crispr-cas9.
The children are now over six years old and reportedly healthy. The third gene-edited baby was born at the end of 2019.
of China the authorities had to put the man in prison at the end of 2019. The commotion in the world was that loud. He was called, among other things, “Chinese Doctor Frankenstein”.
They were released in April 2022 and have slowly become public. At the end of July, he participated in a technology magazine For the MIT Tech Review discussionwhich was broadcast.
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Not much is known about side effects.
He said that he has a private laboratory in the city of Sanya, in southern China’s Hainan Island.
He vowed not to tamper with embryos’ genes again. However, work on genes continues. Now he is looking for, among other things, the genetic causes of Alzheimer’s disease.
Working in a laboratory is expensive. They get funding at least from China and the United States. From whom or from what, he doesn’t say. From the Chinese government and Silicon Valley billionaires?
When He Jiankui sloppy genes, maybe he deliberately forgot one thing.
In the human DNA strand, thousands of genes usually work together. Of course, there are diseases in which only one gene is affected. If you delete one gene, it can affect other genes.
Not much is known about side effects. For critics, it is not enough that the children are said to be still living healthy.
It appears from his research article that the gene tampering was not completely successful. Scientific journals, such as Nature, did not publish the article.
Now it should at least be investigated whether the children carry the hi virus or not. It would be clear, for example, with blood tests.
Cooperation does not work. The Chinese say that in 50 years gene tampering will be common. As common as in vitro fertilization now.
The author is the editor of HS science editorial.
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