subheading: "A cutting-edge gene-editing trial in China went disastrously wrong."
Science: A FATAL REACTION, 2026, Borrell
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Mij
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
"That vague language glossed over tragedy: Seven days after the girl’s medical team infused trillions of viruses carrying the recipe for the base editor into her spinal fluid, she died of a severe immune reaction linked to the therapy, Science and Retraction Watch can now reveal.
According to official documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents, the hospital had allowed Qiu’s experimental treatment to proceed under a regulatory provision that does not require approval from national regulators. After the child’s death, the hospital paid a modest fine to a local health authority but Qiu was not publicly sanctioned.
The troubling death represents a new stumble in China’s push to rival the United States as a biotech power. Three years ago, the government strengthened its biomedical research rules in response to the 2018 scandal around He Jiankui, a biophysicist who violated ethical norms to secretly produce gene-edited babies. The lax oversight of this recent trial and the failure to publicly report the fatality “shows the gap between what is intended and what has been put in place,” says Joy Zhang, a sociologist at the University of Kent who has written about the pervasive culture of secrecy in Chinese scientific institutions."
According to official documents and accounts provided by the girl’s parents, the hospital had allowed Qiu’s experimental treatment to proceed under a regulatory provision that does not require approval from national regulators. After the child’s death, the hospital paid a modest fine to a local health authority but Qiu was not publicly sanctioned.
The troubling death represents a new stumble in China’s push to rival the United States as a biotech power. Three years ago, the government strengthened its biomedical research rules in response to the 2018 scandal around He Jiankui, a biophysicist who violated ethical norms to secretly produce gene-edited babies. The lax oversight of this recent trial and the failure to publicly report the fatality “shows the gap between what is intended and what has been put in place,” says Joy Zhang, a sociologist at the University of Kent who has written about the pervasive culture of secrecy in Chinese scientific institutions."