Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui, who created the world’s first gene-edited children – twin girls born in 2018, plus a third child the following year – has been freed after serving three years in prison, according to the MIT Technology Review. He Jiankui shocked the world four years ago when he revealed he had altered the genetic makeup of IVF embryos, so that they would be resistant to infection by HIV, and implanted them in a woman’s uterus.
News of his experiment sparked international condemnation with the researcher damned by some as “China’s Frankenstein“. It led to He being convicted by a Chinese court in late 2019, which said the biophysicist, educated at Rice and Stanford universities in the US, “deliberately violated” medical regulations and “rashly applied gene editing tech to human assisted reproductive medicine.” It is unclear if He plans to return to scientific research in China or abroad, the report said.
Read the full story: MIT Technology Review.
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