“AN epic” debate within the scientific community has brought one genetic scientific team at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) to the forefront of a major public dispute: should anyone even be researching technology that could modify human embryos?

The team at Sun Yat-Sen University published a scientific paper alleging that they had used gene-editing technology to modify human embryos obtained from an in vitro fertilization clinic. Their purpose was to see whether they could correct the gene defect that causes beta-thalassemia, a blood disease, by editing the DNA of fertilized eggs.

The paper showed that the current method remains highly inaccurate. Among the 86 embryos samples, only 28 survived gene modification. The team concluded that it was still too soon to use technology to edit embryos in a clinical setting.

It’s not the scientific result that aroused public controversy; it’s the research itself.

Before its publication in the low-profile domestic scientific journal calle Protein & Cell on April 18, their team’s report had been refused by the international scientific journals Nature and Science. Nevertheless, it still circulated among researchers worldwide and provoked concern by highlighting how close medical science may be to tinkering with the human gene pool.

“These authors did a very good job pointing out the challenges,” says Dieter Egli, a researcher at the New York Stem Cell Foundation in Manhattan. “They say themselves this type of technology is not ready for any kind of application.”

But some scientists think the human gene pool is sacrosanct and should never be the subject of technological alteration, even for medical reasons. Others tend to be more neutral, saying that germ-line engineering might one day be useful but needs much more testing.

Nature laid out many of its objections in a recent commentary. To begin with, mistakes might occur in the editing process that could result in severe birth defects, and successful edits could affect other parts of the genome that were meant to be left alone. Furthermore, it’s impossible to get consent from future generations who might inherit an altered gene.

Writers of the journal worried that problems with embryo editing could derail work on gene therapy in general and called on scientists to cease all experiments that would affect multiple generations until discussions about safety and ethics were complete.

Those concerns were echoed a few weeks later in an essay in Science that said embryonic gene editing experiments should be off-limits in clinical settings.

Huang Junjiu, associate professor of the School of Life Science at SYSU and leader of the research team said that he stopped the research after the poor results. “If you want to do it in normal embryos, you need to be close to 100 percent,” he told Nature. “That’s why we stopped. We still think it’s too immature.”

“The controversy is nothing more than normal academic argument. We have no plan to give a response on this,” Cai Shanshan, a spokesman for the school, told The Paper.

“Undoubtedly, the research is in accordance with Chinese moral and ethical norms. The objection of the foreign scientific community is merely a result of conceptual differences,” said a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who refused to be named.

Link:

http://beijingtoday.com.cn/2015/05/global-scientists-shoot-down-chinas-gene-editing-efforts/