A maverick researcher claims to have created GM children

THE SECONDDNACRISPR-C9DNA International Summit on Human Genome Editing, held in Hong Kong this week, was supposed to be a forum in which the idea of editing the genomes of human embryos could be discussed calmly and soberly. Fat chance of that. On November 26th, the day before it opened, one of the scheduled speakers, He Jiankui, an expert in sequencing at the Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen, announced that he had already done it, and that twin girls, named Lulu and Nana, had been born in early October as a result.The consensus of the first human-genome-editing summit, which was held in 2015, was that researchers should be allowed to edit genes in human embryos subject to regulation, but that no pregnancy should be established before dealing with questions of safety and ethics (for example, addressing the point that changes to an embryo’s genome may be passed on to the children of that embryo’s adult self). Those questions had become pressing because of the development of a technique called as, which makes editing much easier. So easy, in fact, that there were worries even then that people might start editing it, as it were, in their garages.