Parker Davis

He Jiankui wanted to save the world from HIV, he claimed. He came up with a theory on how to end the HIV threat to humanity and proceeded to execute the theory. That theory involved using genetic editing through CRSPR to create babies that were resistant to HIV. So the Chinese biophysicist proceeded to edit the DNA of human embryos, which were then implanted in a mother’s womb.
The doctor completed this procedure on three children back in 2018. He created CRSPR babies. However, what he expected to receive as a result of his work was not what he ended up receiving. He expected to get the Noble Prize but instead he received a prison sentence from the Chinese government, where he has been since after the last baby was created, until now.
The Chinese government has released the doctor. It is unclear whether he will stay in China or pursue more ‘opportunities’ somewhere else. The doctor’s experiments were exposed by MIT reports which quickly scandalized the scientific community.
The soundness of using CRSPR to edit the DNA of humans is hardly tested, and the implications of corporations and states having the power to offer such services to individuals could someday lead to the selection of preferred humans that might not actually represent the totality of variation a species such as ours needs to sustain to continue to exist at all.

The creator of the CRISPR babies has been released from a Chinese prison- MIT Technology Review

From technologyreview.com

Excerpt:

The daring Chinese biophysicist who created the world’s first gene-edited children has been set free after three years in a Chinese prison.

He Jiankui created shock waves in 2018 with the stunning claim that he’d altered the genetic makeup of IVF embryos and implanted them into a woman’s uterus, leading to the birth of twin girls. A third child was born the following year.

Following international condemnation of the experiment, He was placed under home arrest and then detained. In December 2019, he was convicted by a Chinese court, which said the researcher had “deliberately violated” medical regulations and had “rashly applied gene editing technology to human assisted reproductive medicine.”

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Someday, we might see pigs replace humans as human organ donors. The process called xenotransplantation, transplanting organs from one species to another, has the greatest opportunity to work between humans and pigs. The future might see pigs that are genetically altered becoming potential organ donors for humans in need, especially for organs such as kidneys, livers, and hearts.

genetically modified pigs the future of organ transplants, how close are we to using pigs for a limitless supply of organs to solve the global shortage? : Futurology

From www.reddit.com
2022-04-02 17:25:21
/u/x-files-archiver
Excerpt:

Xenotransplantation has always felt like the next big thing in transplant medicine. There’s no doubt a series of landmark operations have been performed, but only more research will tell us whether the field – and its grand dreams – will ever come of age.

Transplant surgeon Dr Jayme Locke explained: “Our goal would be to have one 10-gene edited pig be able to save a patient with kidney failure, a patient with liver failure, a patient with heart failure and a patient with end-stage lung disease. That would be a remarkable accomplishment and I genuinely believe that we will be there during my lifetime.”

In October 2021, Surgeons in New York City successfully attached a pig kidney to a human patient and watched the pinkish organ function normally for 54 hours. While such procedures have been done in non human primates, this is the first time that a pig kidney has been transplanted to a human body and not been immediately rejected. The procedure, marks progress toward the goal of drastically expanding the supply of life-saving organs. Millions of people around the world are waiting for donated organs, many of which never come.

“We’re never going to satisfy the organ shortage problem with human organs,” says John Scandling, a nephrologist at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in this research. “There’s a limit to the number of deceased donor organs that are viable,” and too few donations from living people.

 

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