China convicts 3 researchers involved in gene-edited babies

He Jiankui who was convicted of practicing medicine without a license was also fined 3 million yuan by a court in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Two other researchers involved in the project received lesser sentences and fines.

Beijing: A Chinese scientist who set off an ethical debate with claims that he had made the world's first genetically edited babies was sentenced on Monday to three years in prison because of his research.

He Jiankui who was convicted of practicing medicine without a license was also fined 3 million yuan by a court in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Two other researchers involved in the project received lesser sentences and fines.

Chinese scientist Qin Jinzhou works with embryos in a laboratory in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province.

The verdict said the three defendants had not obtained the qualification as doctors, pursued fame and profits, deliberately violated Chinese regulations on scientific research and crossed an ethical line in both scientific research and medicine.

The court said the researchers were involved in the births of three gene-edited babies to two women confirming reports of a third baby. It also said they had fabricated ethical review documents.

He, the lead researcher, shocked the scientific world when he announced in November 2018 that he had altered the embryos of twin girls who had been born the same month.

Chinese scientist Qin Jinzhou speaks during an interview with the Associated Press in a laboratory in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province.

The announcement sparked a global debate over the ethics of gene editing. He said he had used a tool called CRISPR to try to disable a gene that allows the AIDS virus to enter a cell, in a bid to give the girls the ability to resist the infection. The identity of the girls has not been released, and it isn't clear if the experiment succeeded.

The CRISPR tool has been tested elsewhere in adults to treat diseases, but many in the scientific community denounced. He's work as medically unnecessary and unethical because any genetic changes could be passed down to future generations. The U.S. forbids editing embryos except for lab research.

An embryologist who was part of the team working with scientist He Jiankui adjusts a microplate containing embryos at a lab in Shenzhen in southern China's Guandong province.

He who is known as JK told in 2018 that he felt a strong responsibility to make an example and that society would decide whether to allow the practice to go forward. He disappeared from public view shortly after he announced his research at a conference in Hong Kong 13 months ago, apparently detained by authorities, initially in an apartment in Shenzhen.

It wasn't clear if the three-year prison term includes any of the time he has already spent in Chinese custody.

Dr. William Hurlbut, a Stanford University bioethicist whose advice He sought for more than a year before his experiment, said he felt sorry for the scientist, his wife and two young daughters.

“I warned him things could end this way, but it was just too late,” Hurlbut wrote to the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins and gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Sad story — everyone lost in this, but the one gain is that the world is awakened to the seriousness of our advancing genetic technologies,” Hurlbut wrote.

He Jiankui, a Chinese researcher, speaks during the Human Genome Editing Conference in Hong Kong, where he made his first public comments about his claim to have helped make the world's first gene-edited babies.

He studied in the U.S. before setting up a lab at the Southern University of Science and Technology of China in Shenzhen, a city in Guangdong province that borders Hong Kong. The verdict accused him of colluding with Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou who worked at medical institutes in the same province.

Zhang was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 1 million yuan. Qin received an 18-month prison sentence, but with a two-year reprieve, and a 500,000 yuan fine.