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Chinese bioethicists are looking at the issues around caring for the world’s first gene-edited babies, and say more needs to be done to regulate research in the area.
It comes as two prominent bioethicists – Lei Ruipeng and Qiu Renzong – last month called on the government to protect the three children, who were born in China.
The scientist responsible for the gene-edited babies, He Jiankui, was jailed for his experiment that drew global condemnation when he revealed it in 2018.
Lei, a bioethicist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, told a webinar last week that CRISPR techniques “evolve every day”.
“It is a very important and fundamental ethical issue – how to treat these people whose genes have been edited,” she said.
CRISPR is a technology that enables researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence. Scientists say it has the potential to cure a range of genetic diseases in the future, but for now that is still a long way off.
Qiu, who was also...