Research On Criminal Law Regulation Of Abusing Human Gene Editing Technology

At present,human society is in a technological era where technology is flourishing.Various new technologies are emerging,and human gene editing technology,which was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020,has been hailed as a revolutionary breakthrough in the life sciences in the 21 st century.Human gene editing technology can treat various cancer diseases by deleting and altering diseased genes in humans,and therefore has great promising value in the medical field.In 2018,He Jiankui and his team at Southern Medical University in China edited twin babies born with a risk of HIV disease through human gene editing technology,and the “gene edited babies” incident attracted widespread domestic and international attention.The “gene-edited babies” case attracted widespread attention from both the domestic and international communities,and was not only condemned morally and ethically by people from various industries,but was also punished by China’s criminal law.However,at the time,there was no direct criminal offence for gene editing in China’s criminal law,and the court eventually convicted He Jiankui and others for unlawful medical practice on the grounds that they were not qualified to practice medicine.Obviously,such a sentence was not sufficient to fully evaluate the conduct of He Jiankui and his team,and in response to this situation,the newly amended Criminal Law Amendment(Ⅺ)in 2020 added a new offence for this conduct.However,by examining the two new offences of unlawful collection of human genetic resources and smuggling of human genetic resources materials under Article 334-1 and unlawful implantation of gene editing and embryo cloning under Article 336-1 of the Criminal Law,it can be found that,due to the haste of the legislation,there are still many inadequacies in the regulation of the misuse of human gene editing technology under these two offences,and further research is needed for this purpose.This article is divided into four parts,excluding the introduction and conclusion.The first part is devoted to the introduction of human gene editing technology through its concepts,its applications and its technical shortcomings.At the same time,the types of misuse of human gene editing technology are classified in relation to its application in different fields.The necessity of criminal law to regulate the misuse of human gene editing technology is then briefly discussed from the perspectives of social harm and unity of legal order respectively.The second part is a review of the current situation and dilemma of the criminal law in China in regulating the misuse of human gene editing technology.The dilemma of the criminal law system is derived from the analysis of the existing criminal legislation,which is mainly manifested in the poor legal connection caused by the monolithic mode of the current criminal law legislation,the differences in the determination of legal interests,the lack of comprehensive types of acts,the lack of unit subjects,the unclear determination of “aggravating circumstances”and the unreasonable setting of penalties in the new offences under the amendment.The third part focuses on the problems of the new offences under civil law.The third part focuses on the legislation and regulation of gene editing in civil law and common law countries,and draws inspiration from the legislation of these countries in terms of the scope of criminal law and the principles of criminal law.The last part of the paper is devoted to the improvement of the existing criminal law system in China.The main focus is to improve the interface between the Criminal Law and the Biosafety Law by changing the legislative model,and then to further demonstrate the legal benefits of human gene editing abuse,as well as to compensate for the inadequacy of the existing criminal law in regulating the abuse of human gene editing technology by optimising the existing relevant offences and creating new offences.