The Chinese Science News commissioned this piece, which was published on December 4, 2018, on page 1, “Top News”. At the time of publication, the title was changed to “Who Should Bear Responsibility for the He Jiankui Incident,” and the content was also somewhat polished. I am posting the original draft here.
Recently, the birth of two gene-edited babies has shocked the world and brought the issue of science-and-technology ethics into the public eye.
In recent years, China’s scientific and technological development has been rapid, and in many fields it has already caught up with the international standard, even reaching world-class levels. But as the He Jiankui incident has exposed, we are still far behind in the field of science-and-technology ethics, and the relevant regulatory system is either completely lacking or exists in name only.
As early as 1946, in order to try Nazi Germany’s human experiments carried out in the name of science, the Nuremberg Code was formulated, marking the institutionalization of science-and-technology ethics. In 1964, the World Medical Association promulgated the Declaration of Helsinki, and after successive revisions, it has long become the common constraint on practitioners in medicine and the life sciences around the world.
Although China was also a victim of fascist human experimentation during World War II, it has not been proactive in building up science-and-technology ethics. To a very large extent, we have merely had to adopt those ethical consensuses reluctantly in order to keep pace with the international scholarly community, so as not to have our research results rejected by foreign peers. But when it comes to how these ethical rules are to be implemented institutionally, we usually just go through the motions.
What we have seen in this incident is that, nominally speaking, He Jiankui had all the necessary paperwork for coping with things, such as ethics committee approval and informed consent forms. But the supervision and constraints that should have been embodied behind these materials were entirely absent. We have found that once the matter blew up, the relevant institutions all rushed to wash their hands of it: I didn’t know, you’re not responsible either; it seems as if all these materials had been improvised by He Jiankui on his own. But if it really only takes one person acting on his own initiative to carry out such a human experiment, wouldn’t that be even more terrifying?
Even if we are a bit optimistic and believe that He Jiankui’s gene editing may have been harmless, and that the two babies can grow up healthy. But if there really were some mad scientist who deliberately edited various dangerous genes to conduct human transformation experiments, could we detect him in advance and prevent him from running amok? Since our system failed to restrain the high-profile He Jiankui, and even afterward was at a loss and did not know how to assign responsibility, how can we expect our system to restrain a low-key, cunning Frankenstein?
Some say that we cannot unconditionally accept Westerners’ ethics, because their ethics excessively restrain scientific research and also do not conform to Chinese values. Well then, even so, what we should do is hurry up and develop science-and-technology ethics with Chinese characteristics, and establish a regulatory system with Chinese characteristics—not simply to decide that we want no ethics and no constraints at all. You can argue that He Jiankui’s behavior is acceptable, but do you accept Frankenstein? Do you accept Unit 731?
What the He Jiankui incident exposes is not the difference between Western ethics and Eastern ethics, but the difference between having ethics and having none; not the difference between excessively strict regulation and relatively lax regulation, but the difference between having regulation and having no regulation—perhaps there was financial oversight and the like, but ethical oversight was obviously a dead letter. The proof is that after the fact, not a single regulator stepped forward to take responsibility. Only He Jiankui, with a tone of pride, declared that he would be responsible for the two little girls; but no one declared that they would be responsible for He Jiankui—whether in support of him or in punishing him.
The ethics committee said it did not know, did not remember; Southern University of Science and Technology said it did not know and that he had already left; the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission said it had not funded it; the Baihualin public welfare organization said it only made introductions and did not participate… In short, all the relevant institutions unanimously disclaimed any connection. In China, disowning one’s connection to the matter is the most commonly used way of “shifting the blame”: “temporary workers” or “we didn’t know,” in any case, the idea is to place oneself outside the matter and let the person involved stand alone to take the shelling. But the problem is that disavowing any connection means that there was no effective supervision. If all the regulators have disowned their connection to He Jiankui, then that proves that our entire system imposed no oversight whatsoever on a medical experimenter. That is a matter far more worrying than the future of those two girls—in fact, apart from these two girls there are several similar cases, which we only learned about because He Jiankui himself broke the story (there is also one unborn baby).
What is frightening is that from the very beginning, this matter seems to have been exposed proactively by He Jiankui himself. It was first reported by journalists as an achievement of positive value, and only then did it become known to the whole world. But if He Jiankui had been a bit more low-key, and the journalists a bit more sensible, perhaps this matter would never have received any attention at all. Would we have had to wait until He Jiankui had “edited” hundreds or thousands of babies before some problem appeared in adulthood, and only then could this “great” experiment possibly have come to light?
Even worse, what we have done afterward is, astonishingly, to wait patiently for He Jiankui himself to voluntarily disclose information. Beyond that, it seems we are still relying on journalists to keep pressing for answers. Although the Guangdong Health Commission has said that an investigation has begun, this news still had to be “exclusively obtained” by journalists, and the method and procedure of the investigation seem not to be transparent.
Public opinion has always focused on He Jiankui himself and on whether gene technology is good or bad. But the key issue is not whether He Jiankui should be judged a hero or a madman; it is to find the regulators or the mechanisms of restraint. The debate over whether ethics restrains scientific research too loosely or too tightly only makes sense on the premise that an effective mechanism of restraint exists at the very least. The debate over whether He Jiankui’s experiment was permissible or impermissible also rests on the premise that impermissible experiments will actually be restrained. The urgent task is the question of whether regulation exists at all. Once we have formed effective ethical constraints institutionally, it will not be too late to discuss whether they should be looser or tighter.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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