The whereabouts of a rogue Chinese scientist and his "gene-edited babies" remain a mystery, as the release of more of his research data triggers renewed discussions of his attempt to create the first gene-edited babies.
He Jiankui, former associate professor of life science at Southern University of Science and Technology of China in Shenzhen, shocked the world last year when he announced that he had edited the genes of the twin girls to prevent them from inheriting HIV from their father.
The claim unleashed a storm of criticism from the international scientific community for the unsafe and unethical use of the technology.
Soon after He announced his "success" in creating the world's first gene-edited babies, he was put under investigations and disappeared from the public eye.
One year later, the Chinese government has provided no public update on He's status and location, and many scientists in China say they are unaware of He's whereabouts.
Chen Bin, an official at the discipline inspection office of He's former university, said even he had no information on the handling of the case.
"I have not been involved," he told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, MIT Technology Review released excerpts of a manuscript submitted by He to an international academic journal about a year ago, which centered around the experiment to edit the genes of a pair of Chinese twins.
In his manuscript, He claimed he had successfully used the gene-editing tool CRISPR to produce a gene mutation that would grant the girls HIV resistance, adding that no off-targets mutations were observed.
But other scientists said the data in the paper did not support the conclusion.
"Instead, the embryos/eventual babies got novel variations, whose effects are not clear," the MIT Technology Review report quoted Stanford University law professor Hank Greely as saying.
Another reviewer of the manuscript, Fyodor Urnov, deputy director at the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, said the author did not honestly interpret his own data.
"It is technically impossible to determine whether an edited embryo 'did not show any off-target mutations' without destroying that embryo by inspecting every one of its cells," Urnov said.
A Shanghai-based life scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the assessment was already widely accepted among researchers after He released most of the data in the paper at a genome-editing conference in Hong Kong in November last year.
It was He's last public appearance. In late December, the New York Times reported that the scientist was being held under house arrest in a guest house owned by his former university.
In January 2019, the government said a preliminary investigation found that He's experiment had resulted in two pregnancies. Besides the twin girls, another woman was still carrying a gene-edited fetus at the time.
The health of the subjects is also unknown.
One Chinese researcher informed about the investigation said the authorities could be hesitating to release their findings because of the breadth of the scandal. But the researcher, who declined to be named, believed the results would be made public eventually.
The scandal has had a huge impact on life science research in China. The Chinese authorities rushed in a series of regulations to tighten up the once-loose controls on laboratory work.
Both the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the two biggest public funders on scientific studies, also issued new rules to punish unethical experiments in life science and other disciplines.
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