Jailed scientist Dr He Jiankui should be made 'responsible' for children whose genomes he edited

Two prominent Chinese bioethicists have recommend the jailed scientist, Dr He Jiankui, be made financially, morally and legally responsible for the health and wellbeing of the children he genome edited.

Bioethicists Qiu Renzong at the Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing and Lei Ruipeng at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan made the recommendations in a document not yet published but seen by the journal Nature. They have also proposed the university he was affiliated with at the time be made responsible for costs, and the Chinese Government set up a research institute aimed at protecting the children's wellbeing and have suggested regular lifelong sequencing of their genomes to check for abnormalities.

'It's an important document and a welcome move by researchers in China', said Dr Gaétan Burgio, a geneticist at the Australian National University in Canberra. 'We don't know which type of genetic mutations will be carried out into adulthood and passed on to the next generation'.

Dr He is currently serving a three-year sentence for using CRISPR to edit the genomes of three children in order, he claimed, to make them immune to HIV. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 approach, which allows scientists to splice out specific DNA sequences from a genome, Dr He turned their CCR5 gene into a mutant form believing this approach could be used to help end the HIV epidemic.

The claim was spurned by his contemporaries on the grounds that the genome edits made in the study were not the same as the mutations that are known to confer natural HIV resistance (see BioNews 1001).

It is also possible off-target mutations caused by CRISPR may lead to other health problems which are not yet fully understood. His actions resulted in a global moratorium on editing human embryos intended for implantation (see BioNews 991) .

Dr He had promised to cover the health insurance costs of the children for the first 18 years, and when the first children, twins, were born prematurely and denied coverage, he had stepped in to pay. At Dr He's court hearing, it was revealed he had paid the couples who participated in the experiment 280,000 Yuan (approximately US$40,000) which alongside a lack of disclosure of this fact, rendered their consent invalid (see BioNews 1003). Consequently, Dr He was found guilty of violating Chinese regulations and medical ethics and imprisoned.