The study, authored by Dan Yang of the Humanities School at Jinan University in Zhuhai, takes a comparative legal approach combined with doctrinal legal analysis. Rather than treating the 2018 incident as a closed chapter, Yang examines the ethical guidelines, the applicable legal framework and the criminal provisions drawn from relevant jurisprudential domains that governed the case. The analysis draws on legal and policy documents, case-related reports from official and authoritative media, and scholarly literature. Its central claim is that the key issue raised by the incident lies in the clinical application of germline editing, a practice that Chinese criminal statutes simply did not address when the edited babies were born.

The technical distinction at the heart of the case matters enormously for understanding why the law struggled to respond. Somatic genome editing, which alters the genes of an individual patient’s cells and affects only that person, has a long history of regulated clinical research. Germline genome editing, by contrast, changes the DNA of embryos, sperm or eggs, meaning any modifications are heritable and pass to future generations. The safety implications are profound: off-target edits, mosaicism and unknown long-term effects cannot be consented to by the person most affected, the future child. Clinical application of germline editing in infants therefore raises safety concerns of a categorically different order, alongside broader social concerns about inequality, eugenics and the commodification of human reproduction.

Before the 2018 incident, China possessed a patchwork of ethical guidelines and administrative regulations touching on assisted reproduction and embryo research, but no dedicated criminal offence covering the implantation of gene-edited embryos. This meant that prosecutors could not charge the conduct itself as a distinct crime. Instead, the case was prosecuted under the offence of illegal medical practice, a charge that captures practising medicine without proper qualification or authorisation rather than the specific act of creating genome-edited babies. Yang’s analysis demonstrates that this mismatch between the gravity of the conduct and the available legal tools was not merely a technicality; it left the central harm unaddressed by criminal law and relied on a provision designed for a different problem.

The study argues that criminalisation of the clinical application of germline editing was warranted, and the Chinese legislature evidently came to agree. In 2021, Amendment (XI) to the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China introduced a new offence of illicit implantation of gene-edited or cloned embryos. This provision made it a crime to implant gene-edited or cloned embryos into a human body, closing the most conspicuous gap exposed by the He Jiankui affair. For the first time, the conduct at the centre of the 2018 scandal had a name in the criminal code, giving prosecutors, judges and researchers a clear statutory boundary.

Yet Yang contends that the new provision remains in need of refinement, and the study advances specific recommendations for its improvement. The details of those recommendations are grounded in the doctrinal analysis of how the offence is drafted and how it interacts with the surrounding regulatory framework. Criminal statutes governing emerging biotechnologies must balance several competing demands: they must be specific enough to give fair warning about what is prohibited, broad enough to cover foreseeable variations of the prohibited conduct, and calibrated so that legitimate research, such as laboratory studies on embryos that are never implanted, is not swept into the criminal net. Striking that balance is notoriously difficult when the underlying science is evolving rapidly.

The comparative dimension of the study is significant because China is not alone in grappling with these questions. Jurisdictions around the world have taken markedly different approaches to germline editing, ranging from outright statutory bans backed by criminal penalties to regulatory prohibitions without criminal sanction. The 2018 incident served as a wake-up call internationally, prompting renewed debate about whether existing frameworks were adequate. By situating the Chinese experience within this broader landscape, the study contributes to a global conversation about how criminal law should respond to technologies that touch the human germline, and what lessons the first criminal-law response to a real genome-editing scandal can offer other nations.

One of the study’s most sobering observations is that, although several years have passed since the incident, impulses and initiatives aimed at advancing the clinical application of human germline genome editing in infants continue to emerge. The He Jiankui case did not extinguish the ambition to edit the human germline for reproductive purposes; it merely demonstrated the risks of doing so without oversight. This persistence is precisely why Yang argues that re-examining the ethical oversight and legal framework remains essential, particularly the role of criminal law in addressing both safety concerns and the broader social concerns that accompany attempts to alter the inherited genetic makeup of humanity.

The structure of governance that emerges from the analysis is layered. Ethical guidelines set professional norms and review requirements for research involving human embryos. Administrative regulations govern licensing and oversight of medical and reproductive institutions. Criminal law sits at the apex as the instrument of last resort, reserved for conduct so dangerous or socially harmful that it must be prohibited outright rather than merely regulated. The 2018 incident revealed that when the lower layers of this system fail, the absence of a criminal backstop leaves society without an adequate response. The 2021 amendment added that backstop, but the study’s recommendations suggest that the task of calibrating it is ongoing.

For the international scientific community, the study offers a rare doctrinal account of how one nation translated scandal into statute. It clarifies the key facts of the incident, demonstrates that the central legal problem was the uncriminalised clinical application of germline editing, defends the decision to criminalise, and identifies where the new offence falls short. As genome-editing tools grow more precise and more accessible, the question Yang poses in the study’s title, whether something has been a crime or should be criminalised, will confront legislatures far beyond China. The answer developed in this case study, that criminal law has a necessary but carefully bounded role in governing the human germline, is likely to shape that debate for years to come.

Subject of Research: Criminal law and ethical governance of human germline genome editing in China following the 2018 gene-edited babies case

Article Title: Has it been a crime or should it be criminalised? A case study on genome-edited babies and the improvement of criminal statutes in China

Article References: Yang, D. (2026). Has it been a crime or should it be criminalised? A case study on genome-edited babies and the improvement of criminal statutes in China. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09376-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09376-1

Keywords: genome editing, germline editing, He Jiankui, criminal law, China, bioethics, CRISPR, gene-edited babies, Criminal Law Amendment XI, embryo research, legal reform, research ethics

The work is spread across three publications: one paper already published in The Alberta Law Review and two forthcoming articles in The Canadian Bar Review and The Dalhousie Law Journal. Together, they trace a persistent lag between what scientists have learned about the limits of certain forensic methods and what courts continue to allow as evidence. Gordon’s central argument is straightforward: when someone’s liberty is at stake in a criminal trial, a technique that has been used for decades should not be taken for granted, especially where the underlying science has never been rigorously validated. Her stated hope is that the research will help judges and lawyers understand what these techniques can and cannot actually tell them, so that forensic evidence is presented in a way that accurately reflects its scientific support.

The most familiar of the three techniques is forensic ballistics, in which bullets and cartridge cases recovered from crime scenes are compared with test firings from suspect firearms. Examiners look for matching striations and impressions transferred from the weapon’s barrel and breech mechanism, and they routinely testify that a bullet came from a specific gun to the practical exclusion of all others. Ballistics evidence has been accepted in Canadian courts for more than a century, and it has played an important role in securing convictions across North America. Yet Gordon found that the scientific research does not support the level of confidence with which ballistics experts often testify. In practical testing, examiners misidentified bullets 37 per cent of the time — an error rate that, if replicated in casework, would represent a serious threat to the integrity of convictions built on such testimony.

The legal landscape around firearms identification may be beginning to shift. In 2023, a Chicago court became the first in the United States to bar the use of ballistics-matching evidence in a criminal case, a decision that signaled growing judicial willingness to question methods once considered untouchable. In Canada, however, Gordon’s forensic firearms article documents that the evidence continues to be routinely admitted, largely on the strength of precedent rather than fresh validation studies. Her papers call on judges to exercise their gatekeeping role more actively, ensuring that experts do not stray beyond what the underlying science can support and that claims of certainty are tempered by the documented error rates now emerging from the research literature.

The second technique under scrutiny is the use of drug-detection dogs, commonly known as sniffer dogs. In Canada, police may deploy such dogs to conduct a search where they have reasonable suspicion that the search will reveal evidence of a drug offence — a deliberately lower threshold than what is ordinarily required for a warrantless search. The Supreme Court of Canada has justified this exception on the grounds that sniffer-dog searches are minimally intrusive, narrowly targeted and highly accurate. Gordon’s review of the scientific evidence that has accumulated since the Court’s most recent rulings in 2013 indicates that these assumptions no longer hold up. In her assessment, the dogs are not nearly as reliable as many courts appear to believe, and the searches that follow their alerts can in fact be quite invasive.

The empirical record on detection dogs is sobering. One Australian study found that drugs were not discovered following nearly 75 per cent of police dog alerts, meaning that three out of four alerts led to searches that turned up nothing. Dogs may alert in the absence of drugs for a variety of reasons, including poor training, residual odours left behind from earlier contact with narcotics, and even odours associated with some common baking ingredients. Handler influence adds another layer of unreliability: a dog can be unintentionally cued by its handler, for example when the handler slows down or behaves differently near a person they already suspect. In such cases, the alert may reflect the officer’s expectations rather than the dog’s independent detection of contraband, undermining the very premise of using the animal as an objective investigative tool.

The consequences of unreliable alerts extend beyond wasted police time. The searches that follow a dog alert can cause fear, anxiety, anger and humiliation for the people subjected to them, and Gordon notes that they may have a particularly negative impact on racialized people, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Among the reforms she proposes are clearer standards for the training, certification and performance monitoring of detection dogs, so that their real-world accuracy can be measured and audited rather than assumed. She also argues that the same legal standard that generally applies to other warrantless searches should apply to sniffer-dog searches, removing the special exemption that currently allows them to proceed on mere reasonable suspicion.

The third discipline examined is bloodstain pattern analysis, which involves examining the shapes, sizes and locations of bloodstains at a crime scene in order to reconstruct the physical events that produced them — the direction of a blow, the position of a victim, the type of force involved. Canadian courts have long accepted the technique as a physical science, but Gordon’s historical digging reveals an origin story that bears little resemblance to laboratory science. The discipline grew out of the work of a chemist experimenting in his basement, who later helped establish the field’s scientific journal and its early textbooks. Those institutional trappings gave the emerging field many of the outward markers of a scientific discipline, even as its foundational claims went largely untested. Practitioners today often invoke concepts from fluid dynamics when explaining their conclusions, despite frequently having little or no formal training in physics.

The rigorous studies that have begun to emerge paint a troubling picture of the discipline’s accuracy. One study found that analysts correctly classified bloodstain patterns only about 70 per cent of the time on rigid surfaces, and just 62 per cent of the time on fabrics — performance levels that fall well short of what one would expect from a settled physical science. Another study found that different analysts frequently reached different conclusions when examining the very same evidence, raising questions about the consistency and reproducibility of the method. Additional research showed that contextual information could bias examiners: what analysts were told about the case or the crime scene could influence the conclusions they drew, a form of cognitive contamination that is well documented in other forensic disciplines but particularly damaging in a field that claims to read physical evidence objectively.

Taken together, the three papers deliver a coordinated call for reform rather than a blanket rejection of forensic practice. Gordon’s argument is not that these techniques are worthless, but that their reliability has been overstated and their limitations under-communicated to the juries and judges who depend on them. The research urges courts to more actively exercise their gatekeeping role by ensuring that forensic evidence is genuinely reliable before it reaches a jury, and it calls for greater scientific literacy among lawyers and judges so that cross-examinations and admissibility hearings can probe expert claims with the depth they deserve. The broader lesson resonates well beyond the three disciplines studied: courtroom longevity is not a measure of scientific validity, and techniques that have gone unchallenged for a century deserve the same empirical scrutiny as any new method entering the witness box. As the gap between forensic practice and forensic science continues to close, the cases that hinge on a dog’s alert, a bloodstain’s shape or a bullet’s striations may look very different in the years ahead.

Subject of Research: Scientific reliability of sniffer dogs, bloodstain pattern analysis and ballistics evidence in criminal courts

Article Title: Sniffer dogs, bloodstain patterns and ballistics evidence under the microscope in new studies

Article References: Sniffer dogs, bloodstain patterns and ballistics evidence under the microscope in new studies. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: forensic science, sniffer dogs, ballistics, bloodstain pattern analysis, criminal law, evidence reliability, courtroom admissibility, police searches, error rates, expert testimony, University of British Columbia, judicial gatekeeping