The first thing that He Jiankui told me is that, in exchange for granting an interview, he usually asks journalists to agree to refer to him as the “pioneer of gene editing.”
I don’t agree, of course. But I know enough about the infamous Chinese biophysicist to understand why he would want to launder his bad reputation.
Back in 2007, He was a brilliant student who had left China to do postgraduate work at some of America’s best research universities; he arrived at Stanford in 2011. An hour’s drive away, at the University of California, Berkeley, was a woman who has as strong a claim as anyone to be the actual “pioneer of gene editing.” Her name is Jennifer Doudna, and in 2012, together with her research partner Emmanuelle Charpentier, she discovered CRISPR-Cas9, a tool that can alter, and delete, human genes.
He hadn’t worked with Doudna or Charpentier—and returned to China by early 2012 to become a professor as part of the Communist Party’s “Thousand Talents Plan,” which incentivizes its most accomplished, overseas-educated scientists to come home. But the CRISPR-Cas9 research was made public. Anyone with the know-how and resources could use the tool.
Which is exactly what He did, six years later. He used it to do something that would ultimately be condemned around the world as deeply unethical—and which would get him a three-year prison sentence in China for “illegal medical practices.”
In late November 2018, He announced that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies—twin girls he said he’d designed to have a trait very few humans are born with: immunity to HIV.
“They called me Chinese Frankenstein,” He, 41, told me.
I’m speaking to him because now, three years after getting out of prison in China, and despite being unable to leave the country, he’s plotting a comeback in America. When we first video-called last month—he was in Beijing, I was in New York—He told me he was on the brink of opening a lab in Austin, Texas. There, he said, he would do Alzheimer’s research—on monkeys and nonviable human embryos—in the hopes of figuring out how to one day edit human embryos in order to prevent the disease.
Or at least, that was the plan.
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Author: Johanna Berkman
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