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recently, he jiankui posted a message on his own media on the internet, saying that he was willing to publish his two papers on the world's first gene-edited babies, but the condition was that they must be published in nature or science. he believed that this research was one of the greatest medical breakthroughs in human history and deserved the honor of being published in these two top journals.

image source: he jiankui's self-media

a few days later, he jiankui broke the news on his own media:he was beaten by an unidentified person and suffered multiple injuries and bleeding.he said that many of his domestic and foreign colleagues were very jealous of his mastery of the core technology of gene editing and were suppressing him at every moment.

image source: he jiankui's self-media

it has been preliminarily determined that the man was instructed by someone, but it is not known who it was.

image source: qingdao news network

after being released from prison in april 2022, he jiankui's whereabouts have been widely watched. he wanted to return to the academic circle and applied for jobs everywhere, but he was rejected everywhere; he wanted to register a non-profit medical research institution and build a new laboratory in daxing, beijing, but ultimately failed; he wanted to move to hong kong for a change of environment, but was suspected of obtaining a visa with false statements...

image source: cover news

in 2023, he jiankui finally found a research position and came to wuhan from beijing to serve as the director of the medical research institute affiliated to wuchang university of technology. however, before he could even get comfortable in the position, he was politely dismissed by the company at the end of the year due to the pressure of various negative reports.

recently, he finally found a place to stay in yazhou bay science and technology city in sanya, hainan, and re-established a laboratory related to gene editing research. he jiankui announced the news through his own media, saying that he had received a 50 million yuan investment from a certain capital, a 1 million us dollar investment from an american entrepreneur, and a total of 2.5 million yuan in scientific research donations.he still firmly believes that gene editing represents the future and may even be the core weapon of the next world war, and that the public will accept this technology.

image source: he jiankui's own media

he was jailed for his research

despite his impressive resume, he jiankui first stepped into the spotlight because of a pair of twin babies.

in 2018, he jiankui completed a controversial gene editing application, and a pair of twin babies were born after gene editing that gave them natural immunity to hiv.

on the day before the opening of the second international summit on human genome editing held in hong kong at the end of november that year, he jiankui announced an explosive news that a pair of twin girls named "lulu" and "nana" had undergone gene editing as early as the embryonic stage and were successfully born before the meeting.

he jiankui in october 2018. image source: apnews

in a subsequent interview, he jiankui introduced the detailed process of gene editing. his team first "washed" the sperm - because the children's father had aids - and separated the single sperm and combined it with the mother's single egg to obtain a fertilized egg. then the experimenters used crispr-cas9 technology to edit the fertilized egg, injecting the cas-9 protein and a specific guide sequence into the fertilized egg with a 5-micron needle.

the goal of gene editing is to modify the ccr5 gene, which is the protein portal for hiv to enter human cells. existing studies have shown that about 10% of the nordic population has a congenital ccr5 gene deletion, and people with this mutation are naturally immune to hiv.

the gene-edited embryos divide and develop in vitro for 3 to 5 days. the researchers take out some cells to check the results of their gene editing. after confirming success, the couples can choose whether to use edited or unedited embryos to try to get pregnant. he jiankui emphasized that the purpose of the experiment is to provide couples affected by hiv with an opportunity that their children will no longer be threatened by the hiv virus.

he jiankui's initial defense did not prevent subsequent opposition voices from all walks of life.

some scientists who have studied the materials made public by he jiankui believe that the experiment itself is not enough to prove that gene editing is effective, nor can it rule out whether it is harmful. they believe that the current evidence shows that gene editing is incomplete and that at least one of the twins seems to be a patchwork of cells with multiple changes.

image source: seattle times

more opponents are concerned not with scientific issues but with ethical issues.

the southern university of science and technology, where he jiankui worked at the time, quickly distanced itself from the incident, saying that he jiankui's actions were conducted privately outside the school and that the school was unaware of it. it also stated its position that this type of research seriously violated academic ethics and norms.

the shenzhen medical ethics expert committee also immediately launched an investigation and conducted an in-depth review of the ethical issues involved in he jiankui's experiment, including verifying the authenticity of the experimental ethics review document. guangdong province also set up a special investigation team to investigate the "gene-edited baby" incident.

at the end of january 2019, the provincial investigation team concluded that he jiankui, in pursuit of personal fame and fortune, raised funds on his own, deliberately evaded supervision, and privately organized relevant personnel to carry out human embryo gene editing activities for reproductive purposes that were expressly prohibited by the state.

on december 30 of that year, the case was publicly sentenced at the first instance by the nanshan district people's court of shenzhen.he jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison and fined rmb 3 million in accordance with the law.

image source: weibo screenshot

in april 2022, he jiankui was released from prison. to this day, the controversy over him continues. in fact, long before he jiankui, there was already a surgeon whobecause of "head transplant", we are at the crossroads of science and ethics.

hot discussion about "head transplant"

in november 2017, italian neurologist sergio canavero announced thathe and professor ren xiaoping's team from harbin medical university in my country successfully connected the head of a corpse to the spine, blood vessels and nerves of another corpse.

dr. sergio canavero source: the guardian

this experiment was just to connect the heads and bodies of two corpses - two corpses that died of natural causes about a month apart - strictly speaking, this is not the so-called "head transplant" promoted by the outside world. ren xiaoping, who completed the operation, emphasized that the team only completed the first head transplant surgical experimental model.

but others obviously don't buy this argument, especially considering canavero's resume.

canavero is a neuroscientist at the advanced neuromodulation group at the university of turin in italy. as early as 2013, he published a paper in surgical neurology international.he proposed the idea of ​​"head transplant" surgery and predicted that humans would be able to achieve it.

image source: europe pmc

in 2015, canavero wrote another paper discussing the feasibility of "head transplant" surgery and summarized several key steps of the surgery:

the donor and recipient must be in the same operating room, and the operation must be performed at a low temperature of about 12 to 15 degrees celsius, so that the body's metabolic rate will be more moderate and will not affect the activity of cells;

the heads of the donor and the recipient must be removed at the same time, with two medical teams performing the surgery simultaneously;

the head is transplanted to the donor's body, and polyethylene glycol (peg) is injected to stimulate the nerves in the spinal cord to connect to the blood vessels and muscles in the neck.

considering that at this temperature, mammalian tissue can only survive for a maximum of 1 hour without blood flowing in the body, the entire process of cutting the head and suturing must be completed within 1 hour;

after the surgery, the patient will be under anesthesia for an additional 3 to 4 weeks while the wound heals and the head and body adapt;

finally, he will need physical therapy, and he will be able to walk again in about a year.

he also predicted that he would perform the first head transplant in 2017.

the use of peg has been demonstrated by canavero's korean collaborator c-yoon kim, who severed the spinal cords of mice at the neck and then reattached them with peg. a few weeks later, the mice were able to smell and move their limbs.

canavero is also preparing for a real "head transplant," where valery spiridonov, a 31-year-old russian computer engineer who suffers from a genetic muscular dystrophy, will lie on the operating table to receive a new body.but later valéry changed his mind and the operation has not been carried out yet.

professor ren xiaoping, canavero's chinese collaborator, performed a head transplant on a monkey in 2016, connecting the blood supply between the head and the new body but not attempting to connect the spinal cord.

the experiment showed that if the head was maintained at 15 degrees, the monkey could survive the operation without suffering brain damage. since then, professor ren xiaoping has been preparing a surgical model for head transplantation in the future.

monkey with head stitched shut image source: newscientist

regarding the ethical issues of performing surgery on corpses, ren xiaoping said: the anatomy institute of harbin medical university provided two fresh male corpses of similar appearance, and obtained the approval of the ethics expert committee and the consent of the patients' families.

in theory, the experiments conducted on corpses do not need to be notified to the family members. after the body is donated, the family members have already agreed to hand it over to the hospital, and the hospital does not need to inform the family members of each use. this is clearly stated in the regulations on body donation.

despite this, the outside world still has many doubts about ren xiaoping's "head transplant". the world association of neurosurgeons issued a statement of opposition:

before humans are able to achieve complete regeneration of severed spinal cord nerves, head transplants are not only unacceptable ethically, but also meaningless scientifically. from an ethical point of view, surgeons in any organization or association must refuse to perform any surgical operation that is not beneficial to the patient.

huang jiefu, director of the chinese organ donation and transplantation committee and former vice minister of the ministry of health, also clearly expressed his opposition, believing that it would be meaningless even if ren xiaoping replaced the head of the corpse, and that the ethics committee of his unit should be held accountable.he said that head transplantation is ethically not allowed, so there is no need to conduct model experiments on corpses.

faced with overwhelming public opinion,harbin medical university, which originally supported the operation, quickly stopped subsequent research and reporting on the operation.

science walks on the boundary of ethics

technology is not guilty. although the development of science and technology has given rise to new possibilities, even beyond the scope of ordinary people's experience and understanding, science and technology have no value preferences in nature and are fundamentally beneficial to all mankind.

at the same time, looking through history, we do see the cruel side of scientific and technological research: the tuskegee syphilis experiment, the hela cell live injection experiment, human radioactivity experiments, secret medical experiments on children, human-ape hybrid experiments... not to mention the horrific human experiments conducted in the context of war like the japanese unit 731!

ethics must be a strong shackle for scienceotherwise, similar incidents will continue to occur.

however, in the eyes of some scientists, ethics and morality are obviously not a "shackle" for scientific research, so one ethical taboo or moral norm after another is constantly broken.

there is no need to panic about this individual phenomenon, because in the history of human science and technology, it is normal for science and technology to challenge ethics. for example, the proposal of heliocentrism was also a great challenge to ethics at the time; another example is the rapid development of internet technology, which infringes on citizens' privacy...

coordinating science and technology with ethics is a permanent proposition for human progress, showing different styles with different backgrounds of different times. fortunately, human scientific and technological civilization is developing, and human institutional civilization is also developing, so we can always correct the deviation in time.

maybe this is the greatest luck for mankind?