New documents suggest Chinese government helped fund the CRISPR babies experiment

The Chinese government might have provided funding that was used in a controversial project to genetically edit babies, according to documents obtained by STAT. Though it’s unclear whether government officials were paying close attention to how the money was used, the documents contradict China’s narrative of scientist He Jiankui as a rebel who acted alone and against the wishes of higher-ups.

Back in November, He Jiankui announced at a conference in Hong Kong that he had genetically edited twin girls using the CRISPR tool to make them more resistant to HIV. The international scientific community quickly condemned the actions, saying that not only was it ethically wrong, the editing itself was sloppy and may not have worked. At the time, the Chinese government also swiftly denounced He and started an investigation that painted an image of a lone scientist who “defied government bans in pursuit of personal fame and gain.”

But the documents obtained by STAT show that He’s research project could have been funded in part by his former workplace, the science and technology branches of both the local Shenzhen government and greater China. However, the funding may have been for previous projects, and other scientists interviewed said that it was possible He pretended to have government funding for credibility.

STAT reported that the science ministry issued a statement in response to the documents, claiming “it did not fund He’s activities of human genome editing.”

Though Chinese researchers feared that He’s experiment has stained the country’s scientific reputation, these new documents don’t necessarily mean that China’s credibility has been damaged anew, says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University. Caplan thinks it’s likely there was some initial level of approval, especially because China doesn’t have an explicit ban on genetically engineering embryos and that kind of research doesn’t trigger the same moral red flags as it does in the US or other countries with strong right-to-life movements. But since then, “the Chinese government has backed away and made it clear they don’t want to go outside the rules in this area,” he says.

“It’s part of the overall issue of bringing China into the international standards for research ethics,” Caplan adds. “But I think China will want to do that. They want to be a major player and they want to be trusted. They have the science, there’s no reason to be moral buccaneers.”

Of course, the international science community is still rushing to figure out how to prevent these experiments from happening again. China’s former vice minister of health Huang Jiefu suggested that the country should establish an organization to oversee biomedical experiments and the World Health Organization, for example, has formed a committee to look into guidelines for editing babies.

Caplan has a few suggestions to add to the mix. First, he says, every scientist who hears about this kind of project should report it to their research institutions and possibly the National Institutes of Health. (As other reporting has shown, plenty of US researchers were at least aware of He’s experiment before it was made public in November.) Second, media exclusives shouldn’t be granted for research of this magnitude, and any announcement needs to be accompanied by a paper with data.

In the meanwhile, plenty of questions remain about what’s next for He and his career and how the twins will fare. He also admitted to editing other embryos that were implanted into women, and it’s unclear when those babies will be born. China is receiving all the attention now, but another question is where else CRISPR babies might be born. The legal landscape is still uncertain, and bioethicist Tetsuya Ishii of Hokkaido University told Nature that there are clinics in Israel, Russia, and Spain that have lax policies on gene editing. “There are so many candidates,” he says.