Aggregated News
He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who sparked global outrage in 2018 when he revealed that he had created the first gene-edited children, has put forward a new proposal for modifying human embryos that he claims could help aid the “aging population.”
He, who in 2019 was sentenced to three years in prison in China for “illegal medical practices,” reemerged last year and surprised the global scientific community when he announced on social media that he was opening a research lab in Beijing.
Since that time, updates on his research posted on his Twitter account have focused on proposed plans to develop gene therapy for rare disease.
But on Thursday, he again courted controversy by posting a new research proposal that experts say is reminiscent of his earlier work, which scientists broadly decried as unethical and dangerous – with the potential to impact human DNA across generations.
In a succinct, one page document, He proposed research that would involve gene-editing mouse embryos and then human fertilized egg cells, or zygotes, in order to test whether a mutation “confers protection...
