HONG KONG — Leading scientists see even more reasons to worry and have more questions than answers after a Chinese scientist attended an international conference Wednesday and repeated his claim to have helped make the world’s first gene-edited babies.
He Jiankui spoke at the gene-editing meeting in Hong Kong where the conference’s leader called his experiment “irresponsible” and evidence that the scientific community had failed to regulate itself to prevent premature efforts to alter DNA.
The work is highly controversial because the changes can be inherited and harm other genes. It’s banned in some countries including the United States. The scientist, He, says twin girls born earlier this month have DNA altered to make them resistant to possible future infection with the AIDS virus.
“They need this protection since a vaccine is not available,” He said to justify his work.
Scientists weren’t buying it.
“This is a truly unacceptable development,” said Jennifer Doudna, a University of California-Berkeley scientist and one of the inventors of the CRISPR gene-editing tool that He said he used. “I’m grateful that he appeared today, but I don’t think that we heard answers. We still need to understand the motivation for this.”
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