Chi­nese court sen­tences Jiankui He to 3 years in jail — and con­firms birth of 3rd CRISPR ba­by

A year af­ter shock­ing the world with the rev­e­la­tion that the world’s first CRISPR gene edit­ed ba­bies had been born, Jiankui He is go­ing to jail for three years.

The ini­tial tri­al found He — a for­mer pro­fes­sor at the South­ern Uni­ver­si­ty of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy in Shen­zhen who hadn’t been seen pub­licly for months — guilty of il­lic­it­ly prac­tic­ing med­i­cine along­side two oth­er re­searchers who as­sist­ed him in “il­le­gal­ly ex­e­cut­ing hu­man em­bryo edit­ing and re­pro­duc­tive med­ical ac­tiv­i­ties with re­pro­duc­tive pur­pos­es,” ac­cord­ing to state news agency Xin­hua. The trio were al­so fined about $640,000 (RMB$4.5 mil­lion) col­lec­tive­ly.

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