Gene editing

The world received a jolt in 2018 – and it wasn’t from a Silicon Valley whiz or a lab at MIT. It came from Shenzhen, China, where a lanky, unassuming biochemist named He Jiankui did the unthinkable. Using the newly discovered CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit, and asking no one’s permission, He edited the genes of Lulu and Nana, twin baby girls, so that both were born immune to HIV. The scientific establishment gasped, jaws dropped and the moralists clutched their pearls. “Monstrous!” the bioethicists cried. “I was just horrified,” said Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the CRISPR gene-editing technique.

“I am officially launching my new company: Cathy Medicine. We will eradicate diseases in future generations through germline gene editing.” This is one of several strongly – and strangely – worded tweets sent in recent weeks from the X account of He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist who served a three-year prison sentence for gene-editing two human embryos. Those embryos are now people: seven-year old twin girls living under the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana. “Good morning bitches,” Dr. He wrote on April 16. “How many embryos have you gene edited today?” “Get in luddite, we’re going gene editing,” he added the next day. He also wrote: “I literally went to prison for this shit.” Is it the real Dr. He? The journalist Antonio Regalado, who first broke the story of Dr.