Dozens of the world's leading geneticists knew about the nature of He Jiankui's scandalous experiments, but preferred to remain silent about it, not believing that he would really create the first genetically modified children. Molecular biologist Natalie Kofler of Yale University writes about this in a column in the journal Nature.
At the end of November, the Chinese molecular biologist He Jiankui revealed that he was able to carry out the first "operation" to edit the DNA of a human embryo and obtain the first "transgenic" children, invulnerable to the action of the immunodeficiency virus.
These revelations caused a storm of protests among politicians, scientists and philosophers, and the activities of Jiankui himself, as the Chinese press reported at the time, attracted the interest of Chinese law enforcement agencies and the university's ethics commission.
Interest in his research was fueled after the geneticist mysteriously disappeared in early December, and began to respond to inquiries only in early January, when rumors appeared that he could be sentenced to the death penalty.
After that, several interesting details were revealed that significantly expanded the circle of Jiankui's accomplices. First, it turned out that the famous American molecular biologist Michael Diem, a teacher of Chinese genetics and, presumably, one of the leaders of the project, was involved in these experiments. Secondly, the media suggested that articles describing the results of these experiments were transferred to the world's leading scientific journals, whose editorial offices refused to publish the results of these scandalous experiments. This made both the public and scholars rethink who might have known about Jiankui's ambitions and who was involved in their implementation. For example, Nobel laureate Craig Mello, one of the discoverers of the mechanism of "suppression" of genes using short RNA molecules, knew about the birth of children six months before Jiankuya dared to tell the world about it. He congratulated the Chinese geneticist, but asked him not to write to him about it again, without informing anyone about such a serious violation of scientific ethics. Later, similar accusations appeared against several geneticists from Stanford, with whom Jiankui was personally acquainted and where he underwent practice during his studies. The scientists themselves declined to comment on these issues, and the university began an investigation into their activities. Why were they all silent? The reason for this, according to Kofler, was that Mello did not believe in the seriousness of his Chinese friend's statements and assumed that "all discussions were theoretical and general." Other scientists, she said, kept their mouths shut for similar reasons. The scandals around "GMO-children" do not end there. Medical science portal STAT News announced earlier this week thatthat in his possession there are documents confirming that Jiankui did not carry out these experiments illegally, but on behalf of the Chinese government and with public money.
These accusations contradict recent statements by the Guangdong provincial authorities and the Chinese authorities.
They came to the conclusion that the disgraced geneticist arbitrarily and secretly organized these studies, in fact, having expropriated the money and material resources of the university for their implementation. Some bioethics believe that the Chinese authorities are planning to use Jiankui as a "scapegoat" in order to remove all suspicions of complicity.