Jiankui He, an associate professor of bioengineering who is
currently on leave from Southern University of Science and
Technology, in Shenzhen, China, has claimed to be the first to
successfully bring to life two genetically-edited twin girls, Lulu
and Nana. The objective was to prevent the twin baby girls from
acquiring HIV infection by modifying their genes.
Jiankui He's team carried out this procedure using the
CRISPR-Cas9. Named breakthrough of 2015 by Science magazine,
CRISPR-Cas9 is a gene-editing tool that holds the promise of
potentially fixing diseases by precisely cutting and pasting
specific gene(s) among the 20,000 human genes.
In this case, by injecting CRISPR-Cas9 into a human egg and
implanting the genetically-edited embryos back into the mother,
Jiankui He's work specifically targets the CCR5 gene that is
responsible for producing a protein that HIV uses to invade the
white blood cells. Specifically, his research has knocked out this
gene to render
