A Gene-Splice a Day Keeps the Doctor Away?

It's that time of year again! That's right - it's time to check on the status of infamous labs/scientific figures within the last 10 years. Bet you thought we were going to talk about taxes since Tax Day is coming up? April fools!

For this week's State of the Bands post, we will be exploring He Jiankui and Elizabeth Holmes. Let's start with the lesser known, He Jiankui. He, a Chinese biophysicist was released from jail recently after serving a 3-year sentence for his unethical conduct in gene-editing the genome of human embryos. He did this using CRISPER-Cas9, and if this sounds familiar, it should; we covered this when it was initially uncovered in 2019. A total of three children were altered to be immune to HIV via modifications to their CCR5 genes. All three children were both to volunteer parents who took part in the study (conducted in 2018). Long story short, the risk to what he did is that CRISPR is not a perfect gene editing process. Similar to when you tear a page out of a book, sometimes the words can be damaged and altered when you attempt to repair said page. While the whole book may not be ruined, the meaning of that single page may be lost. Maybe it was important, or maybe it was just lines of unnecessary setting descriptions, but once the damage is done, it is not possible to reverse. The same concept applies to using CRISPR gene editing. Needless to say, following the reveal at a summit, He was fired from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen and by December of 2019, He was found guilty of illegal medical practices and of forging ethical review documents. 

Will someone else pick up his experiment? More than likely, the answer is no. Human experimentation takes a long time to get approval and it would require a mix of staff that would not be easy to assemble, for example someone with a medical license who specializes in children and/or child development would have been a helpful and appropriate partner to have. What is next for He? Only time will tell.

As He Jiankui finishes his sentence, American biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes may be starting hers. You may have heard of Holmes because of the limited series "The Dropout" starring Amanda Seyfried, or maybe you recall the rise and fall of her biotech empire from 2003 to 2018. Founder of the now dead company Theranos, Holmes was made infamous when her company's product test results were revealed to be falsified. Theranos had allegedly developed a blood test that could use a single drop of blood for standard blood tests (ie: STDs/STIs, insulin levels, cholesterol levels, etc). As most things do, Theranos required funding and Holmes excelled at fund raising and marketing to the point that in 2015 she was named one of the youngest and wealthiest self-made billionaires in the US by Forbes. Of course, her net worth was updated the following year to be nothing once the whistle was blown on her company's fraudulent products. So it should come as no surprise that she was tried and found guilty of wire fraud in January of this year and is currently awaiting sentencing.

Currently, she is out on bail, but could face a maximum of 20 years in prison, a $250K fine, and restitution for each count of wire fraud she was found guilty on. Her sentencing is scheduled for September of this year, so we shall wait and see.