The Crispr Baby Scientist Is Back. Here’s What He’s Doing Next
By Emily Mullin,
Wired
| 12. 21. 2022
In November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world when he announced, first on YouTube and then at an international scientific gathering in Hong Kong, that he had used Crispr to alter the genetic makeup of human embryos, which were used to establish pregnancies and resulted in the birth of the world’s first gene-edited babies.
Backlash against He was harsh and swift. Members of the scientific community condemned his experiments as unethical and voiced concerns over the babies’ health, about which little is known today. The Chinese government suspended his research, saying he violated medical regulations. In December 2019, a Chinese court found He guilty of illegal medical practices and sentenced him to three years' imprisonment. In light of He’s experiment, China has since adopted regulations prohibiting the modification of human embryos for reproductive purposes. He was released from prison in April.
In recent months, He has taken to Twitter and the Chinese social media platform Weibo to publicize his next steps. Previously a researcher at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, He says...
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Photo by TeggorMindFish via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Prophets of techno-paradise tend to bloom and then fade but not necessarily disappear. Malcolm and Simone Collins, a husband and wife team, have been on quite a roll for a couple of years. However, their time in the spotlight may at last be coming to a close, after a report revealed their parenting style.
The Collins family have already featured on this...
GATTACA was released in 1997, but — remarkably — is even more relevant now than it was then, as the technologies whose social implications it explores have developed considerably.
On Thursday, June 13, the California Film Institute presented GATTACA to a sold-out house at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center as part of their Science on Screen series. CGS Associate Director Katie Hasson offered framing for the film and participated in a Q+A discussion.
The film’s plot explicitly involves...
