Overview
- A WeChat essay archived by China Digital Times reports that a six‑year‑old girl with a non‑life‑threatening developmental disorder received an experimental gene‑editing treatment from Qiu Zilong’s team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and later died, with the family said to have paid 5.82 million RMB for the procedure.
- The account says the research team downplayed risks when talking with the parents and that the informed‑consent documents did not explicitly list death as a possible outcome.
- The report asserts that an early manuscript acknowledged the child’s genetic data and the family’s funding but that those references were removed from the final paper published in Nature, and that the parents asked for the paper to be withdrawn before filing a complaint with the journal.
- These claims come from a limited set of sources and have not been independently verified, so inquiries by the university, regulators, and Nature will be needed to confirm what happened and why details may have been edited from the paper.
- The case echoes the He Jiankui precedent and could prompt renewed scrutiny of pay‑for‑treatment human trials, journal disclosure practices, and stronger safeguards to protect patients enrolled in experimental gene‑editing work.