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from the one-kid's-drink-is-another-kid's-poison dept.
China's CRISPR Babies Could Face Earlier Death
When the Chinese scientist He Jiankui created the first gene-edited children, he dreamed of improving the world. He believed the genetic alteration he added to twin girls born last year would protect them from HIV. Human embryo editing, he said, would bring new hope to millions.
Instead, he may have put the twins at risk of an early death.
A new report finds that genetic mutations similar to those He created, to a gene called CCR5, shortens people's lives by an average of 1.9 years.
[...] Now, Nielsen and colleague Xinzhu Wei say they've proved that inheriting two broken copies of CCR5 is bad for you. Their report, published in Nature Medicine, describes how they studied the genetic makeup of thousands of middle-aged members of the UK Biobank. The first thing they noticed was that the number of volunteers in the database with the double mutation was appreciably smaller than expected by chance.
"That tells us there is a process that removes individuals with two copies, and that process is probably natural selection. People die," Nielsen says. For those with the mutation who did volunteer for the database, the bad luck continued. When Nielsen compared volunteers' DNA with death records, he found that those with two non-working CCR5 genes had a higher mortality rate.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05 2019, @04:53AM
The score after 10 minutes is 1-0 to CRISPR. Let's see how HIV can respond. They're coming into the game with an excellent track record of trashing you weak humans.