China's CRISPR Babies Could Face Earlier Death

A new report finds that the CRISPR babies created by Chinese scientist He Jiankui last year may be at risk of an early death. It finds that genetic mutations similar to those He created, to a gene called CCR5, shortens people's lives by an average of 1.9 years. MIT Technology Review reports: 'It's clearly a mutation of quite strong effect,' says population geneticist Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California, Berkeley, who made the discovery while studying DNA and death records of 400,000 volunteers in a large British gene database, the UK Biobank. 'You can't have many mutations that do that, or you wouldn't live that long.' The finding offers a warning light to anyone else seeking to enhance human beings. That's because many genes have more than one role, and scientists tinkering with the balance are likely to cause side effects they didn't expect or want.

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