Oldal 353 [353]
OCR
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-geneedited-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 + 351 *
