At the genome expert meeting held in Hong Kong, all parties affirmed He Jiankui's appearance and explanation, but severely criticized his method, pointing out that there are many problems in his approach.

Chinese scientist He Jiankui has defended himself in his first public appearance since he drew global condemnation for claiming to have created the world's first gene-edited babies.He Jiankui announced the potentially groundbreaking work earlier this week, with the birth of twin girls dubbed Lulu and Nana.

The baby girl's father was HIV-positive, and the gene editing was aimed at deleting the CCR5 gene that allows HIV to infect cells.He Jiankui said he used CRISPR gene-editing technology, which disables or changes faulty genes by snipping strands of DNA.

The claim has not yet been peer-reviewed, and he has provided no data or evidence to support his work, prompting scoffing at his announcement and raising ethical concerns among his scientific peers, regulators and legal experts.

But He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, speaking at a packed meeting of genome experts in Hong Kong, said he was proud of his work and said he needed to keep it secret to protect the baby girl's family, while submitting the study to a scientific journalBe judged.

He Jiankui said that eight couples initially participated in the experiment, and one woman was pregnant with the gene-edited embryo.There was another, he said, before adding that clinical trials had been put on hold because of the recent controversy.

He Jiankui said he has largely self-funded the project, with the university covering some of the sequencing costs.But he acknowledged that the university was unaware of the research he was conducting.

Conference organizers and delegates affirmed He Jiankui's appearance and explanation, but severely criticized his methods.

David Baltimore, chairman of the organizing committee of the meeting and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, stated that unless and until safety issues are resolved and society has a general consensus, any clinical germlineEditors are irresponsible.

We only found out about it after the fact, so we felt left behind, he added.

Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who set the stage for He Jiankui's speech, said conference organizers were not informed of the potential for gene-edited embryos.Work.

He had sent me the slides he would present at the meeting, but those slides did not include any of the work he was going to discuss now, he said before He Jiankui's presentation.There is some clinical data, but nothing about implanting human embryos.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Robin Bull; Lovell-Batch said the long-term consequences could hurt all scientists.I fear there will be a backlash because other scientists will be involved, doing basic research, and the government will simply say, we're going to ban this research.That would be very bad for progress, he said.

Although He Jiankui answered some questions, Dianne Nicol, director of the Center for Law and Genetics at the University of Tasmania, said he sparked 1 millionnew questions, including: How did he get consent from volunteers?Why didn't he submit the experiment for peer review?And how would he have enough money to advance this work himself?

Matthew Proteus, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford University, said his own act of paying for the trial raised ethical questions.When you have to seek outside funding, that's another way to get evaluated, because you need peer reviews, contracts, things like that, he said.Paying for it yourself avoids scrutiny.

He Jiankui has also come under fire in China, with peers and regulators criticizing his approach.Earlier this week, more than 100 Chinese scientists and scholars signed a joint statement calling the experiment insane.

Zhai Xiaomei, a bioethics expert at Peking Union Medical College, said He Jiankui violated Chinese law in ethical approval.She fears the case will damage the reputation of the industry as a whole.

Chinese scholars were quick to react, and there was a consensus that this should not be allowed, she said.

Xu Nanping, vice minister of science and technology, said authorities were paying close attention to the incident, according to the official Xinhua news agency.Xu Nanping added that guidelines regulating work on gene-edited embryos prohibit their implantation into humans.

Translator/Japanese style