https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601235/chinese-researchers-experiment-with-making-hiv-proof-embryos/
Chinese fertility doctors have tried to make HIV-proof human embryos, but the experiments ended in a bust. The new report is the second time researchers in China revealed that they had a go at making genetically modified human embryos.
The controversial experiments are, in effect, feasibility studies of whether it’s possible to make super-people engineered to avoid genetic disorders or resist disease.
“It is foreseeable that a genetically modified human could be generated,” according to Yong Fan, a researcher at Guangzhou Medical University, who published the report
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The Chinese scientists tried to make human embryos resistant to HIV by editing a gene called CCR5. It’s known that some people possess versions of this gene which makes them immune to the virus, which causes AIDS. The reason is they no longer make a protein that HIV needs to enter and hijack immune cells.
Doctors in Berlin demonstrated the effect after they gave a man sick from HIV a bone marrow transplant from a person with the protective gene mutation. The man—known since as the “Berlin patient”—was cured of HIV, too.
Using the gene-editing method called CRISPR, Fan and his team tried to change the DNA in the embryos over to the protective version of the CCR5 gene in order to show, in principle, that they could make HIV-proof people.
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