As a former professor in the Bioengineering Department at Rice University I was a colleague of Michael W. Deem, the Ph. D. mentor of He Jiankui. During a recent interview by Science Transparency, I became acquainted with a defense of He Jiankui by Prof. George Church, a leading figure from Harvard and a CRISPR pioneer. I was truly dismayed at what I read. In an interview with Science, George Church indicated his “obligation to be balanced” regarding the He Jiankui affair. Thus, George Church informed us that the “most serious thing” about He Jiankui’s experiment was “that he didn’t do the paperwork right.” This defense strikes me as odd, to say the least.
It seems quite obvious at least to me that He Jiankui misled the participants in the trial. They were not even aware of what they were signing up for. He Jiankui deceitfully misrepresented his work as an “aids-vaccine development project.” He Jiankui stated at the Hong Kong summit that he personally engaged the volunteers through an informed-consent process aided by another professor (Michael Deem?). The consent document that he used describes the procedure in extremely technical language, virtually incomprehensible for anyone not seriously involved with the subject. Neither He Jiankui nor his collaborator informed about the risks of off-target effects, or about the fact that gene editing was a prohibited and shrouded in ethical controversies.
And He Jiankui and his collaborator misled the patients in other ways. They did not present the patients with a “consent form” but rather with a “business form”, the kind a company would use for subcontracting. The section about possible risks said nothing about off-target effects or the consequences of methodological errors, and instead focused almost exclusively on freeing He Jiankui and his team of any liability.
Furthermore He Jiankui deceived his own institution. He did not tell Southern University of Science and Technology about the experiment and took an unpaid leave to work in the utmost secrecy. Worse, He Jiankui claimed that he received ethical approval from Shenzhen Harmonicare Hospital. However, in a statement, the hospital informs that the Medical Ethics Committee never met to discuss He Jiankui’s project, and that the signatures on the ethical approval form “are suspected to be forged.” While He Jiankui was working in secrecy, he was also building a public-relations campaign. He even engaged the services of PR consultant Ryan Ferrell and created YouTube videos describing his scientifc adventure.
All this seems to me to be a far cry from George Church’s dismissive statement that “He Jiankui didn’t do the paperwork right.”
I was also appalled by the rest of the interview that George Church gave. In a bizarre twist of logic, Church tells us that “as long as these are normal, healthy kids it’s going to be fine for the field and the family.” What sort of ethics is at work here? This is like saying “you are free to shoot anyone as long as you don’t kill or hurt the person”. Or “you are free to do anything as long as there are no adverse consequences”.
George Church may well be God’s gift to genetics but bioethics is not his forte…