Hi, I'm Jim Denison with Dennis in Form, and this is the Daily Article for Wednesday, November 28, 2018.

It sounds like the plot of a bad science fiction movie. A renegade scientist violates global moral standards to engineer a new breed of humans.

But that's what has happened if a Chinese scientist is to be believed.

Hey, Zhuang Kui, a researcher with a PhD from Rice University and postdoctoral training at Stanford,

announced this week that he has created the world's first genetically edited babies.

The twin girls were born this month.

However, Dr. Hay did not publish his research in any journal or share any evidence or data

to prove his claims.

He spoke today at the Human Genome Editing Summit in Hong Kong, where he announced another

potential pregnancy involved in his study.

He said he felt proud of his work in the face of nearly universal condemnation.

Dr. Hay states that the father of the twins has HIV. As a result, Dr. Hay used a

genetic editing technique known as CRISPR-9 to disable the embryo CCR5 gene to make them resistant

to HIV infection. However, there are other ways to produce embryos from HIV-infected men without

altering their genes.

And HIV experts said that about half of HIV strains don't need the gene Dr. Hay edited

to infect patients, meaning the immunity he tried to confer is not complete.

A gene editing expert warned that people without normal CCR-5 genes face higher risks of getting certain viruses, such as West Nile and of dying from the flu.

Many scientists are appalled by this announcement.

I think that's completely insane, said Shukrat Matalapov, director of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health and Science University.

Modifying human embryos at this

stage in our understanding of biology is clearly unethical, said Christopher Anderson, a bioengineering

...