Chinese scientist who produced genetically altered babies sentenced to 3 years in jail
He Jiankui, the Chinese researcher who stunned the world last year by announcing he had helped produce genetically edited babies, has been found guilty of conducting “illegal medical practices” and sentenced to three years in prison.
A court in Shenzhen found that He and two collaborators forged ethical review documents and misled doctors into unknowingly implanting gene-edited embryos into two women, according to Xinhua, China's state-run press agency. One mother gave birth to twin girls last November; it has not been made clear when the third baby was born. The court ruled that the three defendants had deliberately violated national regulations on biomedical research and medical ethics, and rashly applied gene editing technology to human reproductive medicine.
All three defendants pleaded guilty, according to Xinhua. The court also fined He, formerly of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen (SUSTECH), three million Chinese yuan ($429,000). His collaborators were identified as Zhang Renli of a medical institution in Guangdong Province, and Qin Jinzhou, from a Shenzhen medical institution; Zhang received a 2-year prison sentence and was fined one million yuan, according to Xinhua, while Qin was given 18 months in prison, but with a two-year reprieve, and a 500,000 yuan fine.
Xinhua explained that the court heard the case in private to protect the personal privacy of individuals involved. The news report says physical and documentary evidence and witness and expert testimony were presented to the court but gave no details.
Both prison and a fine would have been the likely penalties if someone had done what [He] did in the U.K.
In November 2018, He announced that he had modified a key gene in a number of human embryos in a way thought to confer resistance to HIV. The modification might be passed on the descendants of children born with it. He recruited couples in which the father was infected with HIV but the mother was not. In a talk at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, He said he wanted to spare the babies the possibility of becoming infected with HIV later in life . The technique could be used to reduce the HIV/AIDS disease burden in much of Africa, he argued, where those infected often face severe discrimination.
The announcement touched off a firestorm of criticism from scientists and ethicists in attendance at the summit and around the world. Experts agree that there are safer and more effective ways to prevent HIV infections, and the experiment was deemed premature, irresponsible, and unjustified because it exposed the babies to risks associated with gene editing for little, if any, benefit.
Guandong Province, which Shenzhen is part of, conducted an investigation that concluded " He had defied government bans and conducted the research in the pursuit of personal fame and gain ." But details of the investigation, including who conducted it, were never publicly released. Instead the results were publicized in January 2019 by Xinhua. SUSTECH dismissed He at that time. The Chinese government later tightened regulations covering human genome editing. He has not been seen in public since his presentation at the Hong Kong conference.
But many key questions surrounding his activities remain and scientists are hoping more information will be forthcoming. "We had been wondering what had happened to He Jiankui; there has been little if any news on his whereabouts or the progress of any investigation being conducted by the Chinese authorities, or of other details surrounding what he had done, for many months," Robin Lovell-Badge, a stem cell biologist at The Francis Crick Institute in London said in a statement distributed by the U.K.’s Science Media Center. "In that sense alone, the information now released is reassuring," he added. Lovell-Badge said he cannot comment on the severity of the sentence, "but both prison and a fine would have been the likely penalties if someone had done what [He] did in the UK."
Lovell-Badge hopes all three babies are happy and healthy and says they deserve privacy. But "There are still many details of the case that have yet to be released," he says. These include confirmation of the edits made to the target gene and whether the editing affected other parts of the genome, among other technical issues. There is also the question of how He "could have proceeded with what he did with so much secrecy."