It now turns out that the American biophysicist Michael W. Deem from Rice University was far more involved in the widely condemned “CRISPR babies” experiment than was previously known. STAT learned that Deem was the senior author on a paper entitled “Birth of twins after genome editing for HIV resistance” submitted to Nature in November, 2018. The first […]
He Jiankui, the scientist who achieved notoriety with the gene-edited babies scandal, may be facing an unusually harsh punishment in China. Even the death penalty seems to be in the cards. The most troublesome aspect of his misadventure appears to be that which relates to corruption charges. He Jiankui allegedly misled the participants in the […]
By Ariel Fernandez 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 […]
The genetic editing of human embryos through a molecular biology manipulation known as CRISPR surely sent shock waves across the globe. Many felt that He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who carried out the experiments had opened Pandora’s box. Yet, as people had now some time to ponder over the events, the scientific establishment has […]
The picture shows the cover page of a doctoral dissertation, with Professors Ariel Fernandez and Michael W. Deem in the bioengineering thesis committee at Rice University. There was no genetic editing of human embryos at the time, just theory, bioinformatics, computational bioengineering and speculation. Michael W. Deem was also the doctoral advisor of He […]