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LEGAL THINKING ABOUT OUR EDITED SELF
of Science and Technology issued an order to suspend any work at He’s laboratory.
After He left the summit on gene editing, he went to an unknown destination and
all kinds of rumors spread about his whereabouts.
There are a number of professional and ethical concerns regarding the
intervention. For example, He disabled a completely healthy gene in order to
reduce the risk of a disease that the children did not even have and that could
have been prevented by antiviral drugs and safe sex. Even if the experiment was
successful, disabling CCR5 does not guarantee full immunity to HIV infection,
because some strains may enter healthy cells through another protein.
According to Kiran Musunuru, many scientific objections may be raised
against He’s experiment.'* The most pervasive one is the mosaicism in the twins,
which means that the gene editing did not lead to consistent outcomes in the cells
and the interventions carried out influence the various cells of the children. in
different ways. Moreover, only half of Lulu’s CCR5 genes were edited; it appears
that the other cells are all intact.
The Chinese gene-edited baby case was in front of the People’s Court of
Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province and the judgement was held
on December 30, 2019.
The court found that He Jian-kui and others committed a crime of “illegal
medical practice”, sentenced to a fixed-term imprisonment of 3 years to probation,
and a fine of 3 million yuans. Although the reference to illegal practice usually
means that medical activity was conducted without license, it is not entirely clear
what was the basis of the criminal proceeding in the Chinese law. Nevertheless, in
December 2020 China modified its criminal code to adopt a ban on changing the
human genome. In the new amendment” “Illegal medical practices” were added
to Article 336, which includes “the implantation of genetically edited or cloned
human embryos into human or animal bodies, or the implantation of genetically
edited or cloned animal embryos into human bodies.” This amendment entered
into force on March 1, 2021. This new law has no retroactive effect but clearly
indicates that China would like adopt international standards of genome ethics
in the future.”
18 The view from inside the ‘medical scandal’ of China’s gene-edited babies. Ina Q&A, geneticist
Kiran Musunuru describes his unintentional connection to the scientist behind the scandal
and the book that came out of the experience available online at https://penntoday.upenn.
edu/news/Penn-geneticist-offers-perspective-from-inside-medical-scandal-chinas-gene¬
edited-babies.
B Amendments to the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China (11) (Adopted at
the 24th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress on
December 26, 2020), in this revision Act (article 39), a new article 336-1 were added.
Iam very grateful to Yao-Ming Hsu for his kind help with the clarification of the relevant
Chinese law.
20
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