Thread by @antonioregalado

Three people convicted in the CRISPR baby case are

We all know who He Jiankui is. But who the heck are Zhang Renli (two years) and Qin Jinzhou (18 months)??

Turns out they are the embryologists. THREAD on why that matters.

https://twitter.com/antonioregalado/status/1211533342744678400

So He submitted a paper to Nature (and later JAMA) detailing the editing of human embryos which lists ten authors, nearly all from the Southern University of Science and Technology.

We got a copy of it a while back and you can see some excerpts here. technologyreview.com/f/614779/china…

So Qin Jinzhou is the first author listed on the draft manuscript and given his expertise, in embryology, you can infer he actually injected the CRISPR into the embryos.

Some have pointed out that Qin Jinzhou's background was pretty thin to be editing human embryos. He was from an agricultural college.

https://twitter.com/shsternberg/status/1067074940661313539?lang=en

Another interesting fact about the now convicted Qin is that he appeared in @AP photographs taken in He's lab before the announcement of the twins, but as part of publicity effort.

here he is at the scene of the crime?

@AP who is Zhang Renli? he's not listed in the author field of the draft of the twins manuscript that I saw.

But he does appear listed in a second manuscript, describing run up experiments on animal and human embryos.

Zhang is second of six "co-first authors" on that paper

The paper, in the section listing contributions by different authors, Zhang Renli (Z.R.) is said to have "performed the human embryo microinjections" along with Qin (J.Q.).

Zhang's affiliation is the Reproductive Medicine Center, Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences/Guangdong General Hospital, Guangzhou 510080, China

Its significant that, in addition to Dr. He, the only people convicted today are the embryologists who literally injected the CRISPR into the embryos.

So is that the action being punished? Because, um, a fair of researchers do that (for research anyway).

Or was it because they didnt just edit embryos but "intended" the embryos be used for reproduction?

I'd be keen to learn what is the exact Chinese law at issue here.

Would it also be criminal to be the doctor who actually transferred the embryo to a uterus?

((One curious side issue is that Chinese court apparently did not locate the doctor who transferred the embryo! Totally strange. ))

I am starting to think maybe there wasn't really normal doctors involved. Maybe the embryologists or some fly by night clinic did the transfer of the embryos. (END)

PS -- Further report from Xinhua (state media) places substantial blame on Zhang. My reading of translation is that he actually edited the twins' embryos not Qin. Why isn't Zhang listed as an author on draft twins paper? Could be some kind of deception.
big5.xinhuanet.com/gate/big5/www.…