The issue of genetically modified babies in China has resurfaced because the scientist 'the creator' of these babies, He Jiankui, was immediately released from prison. Then what happens to the gene engineered baby?
In 2018, Jiankui experimented with CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palyndromic Repeats) technology to modify human embryos and make them resistant to the HIV virus. This experiment led to the birth of twins, Lulu, Nana, and Amy.
Instead of getting recognition or praise for his experiments, scientists both in China and around the world, condemned Jiankui's research. He was thrown into prison in 2019.
Dimitri Perrin, senior lecturer at Queensland University of Technology and Gaetan Burgio, geneticist from The John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, explained that CRISPR is a technique that allows scientists to precisely edit each DNA by changing its sequence.
When using CRISPR, we can try to 'destroy' a gene by turning it inactive or trying to achieve certain modifications, such as introducing new DNA or deleting a desired piece of DNA.
Modification Failure
Quoted from The Conversation, Jiankui and colleagues target to get a gene called CCR5. This gene is very important for the HIV virus to enter white blood cells (lymphocytes) and infect the human body.
One of the CCR5 variants, namely CCR5 32, does not have a combination of 32 letters in the DNA code. This variant occurs naturally in the human population and results in high levels of resistance to the most common types of HIV.
Jiankui and his team wanted to recreate this mutation in human embryos using CRISPR in an attempt to make human DNA immune to HIV infection.
But this process didn't go as well as planned, and there were steps that allowed them to fail the research. First, despite their unpublished claim, they claim to have reproduced the human CCR5 mutation, when in reality they are only trying to modify CCR5 close to the 32 mutation.
As a result, they instead produce different mutations whose effects are unknown. These mutations may or may not confer resistance to HIV and may or may not have other consequences.
Worryingly, they didn't test this first and instead implanted the gene directly in embryos. This action cannot be justified.
Lulu, Nana, Amy Become Mosaic Organisms
The second source of error occurs because gene editing is not completely efficient. This means that not all cells in the embryo need to be edited. An organism is called a 'mosaic' when it has a mixture of edited and unedited cells.
Although available data are limited, it appears that the babies are mosaic organisms. This makes Lulu, Nana, and Amy much less likely to be a gene-edited baby that is resistant to HIV infection.
"Arguably the biggest twist of this experiment was a mistake. It turns out that the babies involved (Lulu, Nana, Amy), were not gifted with the neatly edited gene," the report said, quoted by BBC Future, Wednesday (16/3/2022). .
"Not only are they not necessarily immune to HIV, they have been inadvertently endowed with an entirely fabricated version of CCR5. They likely don't exist in any other human genome on the planet. However, such changes can be inherited. They can be passed on to children. them and so on," the report states.
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London warn that genetically editing human embryos can have unintended consequences. By analyzing data from previous experiments, they found that about 16% had accidental mutations that would not be detected through standardized tests.
Can they be overcome and how can they affect future generations? This seems to be a problem for the future. For years, the existence of Lulu, Nana, and Amy was only confirmed during scientist experiments. They are the first babies in the world to be genetically engineered. The identities of them and their parents have never been revealed to the public.
The latest report on Lulu, Nana and Amy was an article published in December 2021 in the journal Nature Biotechnology entitled The CRISPR Children by Vivien Marx. He reported that the genetically modified babies were healthy.