Chinese scientist who sparked controversy over DNA claims ‘needs time to provide evidence’
Chinese scientist Han Chunyu says he needs more time to provide evidence to support his controversial claims about a new gene-editing tool, which have been questioned by his peers on the mainland and abroad.
“I beg everyone to be a bit more patient. I [insist] what I said before [is true], but there will be new information soon,” the associate professor of biology told the Science and Technology Daily, a newspaper run by the Ministry of Science and Technology, on Tuesday evening.
I beg everyone to be a bit more patient. I [insist] what I said before [is true], but there will be new information soon
More Chinese researchers have broken their silence and joined the call for an investigation into Han’s experiment, which was initially hailed as a breakthrough in engineering human and animal genes.
Two influential mainland life scientists, Professor Rao Yi of Peking University, and Professor Shao Feng, deputy director of the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, who initially supported Han’s claims, published an open letter on Tuesday evening demanding that Han’s university investigated his experiment.
Their letter followed an open petition signed on Monday by about a dozen Chinese laboratories, which questioned Han’s findings and called for a “thorough investigation by an independent third party”.
In May, Han’s team at Hebei University of Science and Technology claimed they had developed NgAgo, a powerful technology that would allow biologists to manipulate the genes of humans and other living species with unprecedented simplicity and accuracy. But since then many laboratories in China and around the world have failed to replicate the results.