Last November, Reminwang, the official website of the Chinese ruling party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, triumphantly announced that “the world's first genetically edited babies have been born in China”.
However, the adulation was short-lived. The breakthrough set off a storm of backlash within domestic and international scientific communities for ignoring ethical concerns around the genome editing of embryos. A practice which is currently banned in several countries including the UK.
In response to the condemnation, the People’s Daily website quietly deleted the initial report and ran an editorial, “Scientific Developments Cannot Leave Ethics Behind”. Two months later, the state-owned Xinhua News Agency reported that after an investigation, the scientists who carried out the gene-editing “seriously violated” state regulations and are likely to face criminal charges.
