The recent birth announcement by a Chinese scientist is a bombshell in the world of artificial reproductive techniques.
Alliance VITA denounces the way some researchers have tested controversial techniques, whose safety and efficacy have not been proved whatsoever, in order to create genetically-edited babies, taking advantage of families who are already afflicted by disease. This foreboding signal from China comes on the eve of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing to be held in Hong Kong. If these alleged claims are confirmed, we can only hope that the international community will voice their outrage, to condemn these experiments, and take action to ward off any new regulatory violations.
Blanche STREB, Alliance VITA’s Director of Training and Research, Author of “Designer Babies- Towards a dystopian civilization”
“If this alleged claim is confirmed, it is an announcement that many scientists have feared for a long time: a bombshell exploding in the fragile international bioethical wall. The red line would have been crossed: a baby born from this technique is definitely an object, a guinea pig.
The scientist asserts that the each embryo’s DNA was checked, before being implanted in the mother’s uterus. However, it is impossible to check every individual cell, or even predict possible “collateral damage” in advance. It is impossible to perform clinical trials since each embryo is unique, with its own specific DNA. These cannot even be qualified as human clinical trials, but rather as directly experimenting on human beings!
While some embryos are being sorted and pre-selected in a crazy pursuit to design “perfect babies”, other scientists have deliberately decided to create embryos from scratch, then manipulate them, in a worrisome artificial reproduction frenzy to obtain “a baby at any price”, in defiant contempt of the most basic precautionary principle.”
