(Shanghai/London Comprehensive News) Chinese scientist He Jiankui was selected as one of the top ten figures of the year by the authoritative British scientific magazine Nature for gene editing.The magazine called him a gene-editing hooligan and said other scientists worried that the He Jiankui incident was unethical and would hamper future research related to gene editing.
Comprehensive Nature and The Paper reported that He Jiankui, an associate professor at Southern University of Science and Technology, announced in November that the world's first gene-edited baby immune to AIDS was born.His team used the CRISPR technology commonly known as gene scissors to edit the CCR5 genetic gene of a pair of twin embryos, making them immune to AIDS, which caused great controversy. Other scholars in the field also worried that it would be more difficult to apply for funding for gene editing related research in the future.
In a character feature article, Nature described He Jiankui as a CRISPR Rogue, and predicted that he would come and go on the world stage in a hurry.
The article revealed that He Jiankui became a monk halfway. He published his first paper 10 years ago in the field of quantum physics, and later in 2010 he published several papers related to economics, evolution theory, and DNA repeatability in virus genes.
The article also revealed that He Jiankui had visited many relevant scholars on the issue of gene editing, including Zhang Feng, a pioneer of CRISPR technology who works at MIT, and Mark DeWitt, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley.and others.
Zhang Feng warned He Jiankui not to genetically edit human embryos for reproduction, and other scientists have outright refused to meet with him.
