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Scientists are knocking on heaven’s gate
On April 10, 2019, scientists finally presented the first picture of hell’s gate. This is how one scientist described what happens when you get near the gate: “Your feet feel a stronger gravitational pull than your head and as a result your body is stretched apart like a spaghetti until you reached the central singularity where you are squashed into a single point of infinity density.” But that is if we are looking from outside. From inside, what happens to you is that you may plunge into it unharmed though you won’t be able to escape it to tell the story.
Friends, countrymen, Africans, it is not your father’s world anymore. Thanks to scientists who have refused to be tied down by the limiting chains of conventional wisdom and dogma on the imagination of man.
In November of last year, He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist stunned audience at a biomedical conference in Hong Kong when he announced that he had used gene-editing to alter the DNA of twin girls. The father of the girls was HIV-positive and Jiankui’s gene-editing altered genes in the twins’ DNA that made the babies immune to HIV.
For daring to perform this aspect of genetic engineering first imagined in the 1970s, He Jiankui is currently under house arrest in his apartment at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. He may face the death penalty…