When a scientist announces the opening of a new laboratory, it doesn’t ordinarily make news around the world. But Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui is no ordinary scientist.
He’s announcement at the end of November came just seven months after he completed a three-year prison sentence for practising medicine illegally. At issue was He’s 2018 YouTube announcement that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies.
As details became clear, scientists and lawmakers inside and outside China condemned He’s actions, and he was ultimately fired, fined and sentenced to prison. Gene editing also received a lot of negative press, with the usual stories about designer babies flooding the media. He’s new announcement could result in a repeat of the hysteria.
Indeed, stories raising the spectre of eugenics led Canada to prohibit human gene editing long before He created his designer babies. He employed a technique known as CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, which acts like a pair of scissors that allows scientists to edit parts of the human genome.
“I’m not a scarcity guy, I’m an abundance guy”
– Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm, The New Yorker, 4/14/25
Even the most casual consumers of news will have seen the run of recent headlines featuring the company Colossal Biosciences. On March 4, they announced with great fanfare the world’s first-ever woolly mice, as a first step toward creating a woolly mammoth. Then they topped that on April 7 by unveiling one...
China's most infamous scientist is attempting a comeback. He Jiankui, who went to jail for three years after claiming he had created the world's first genetically altered babies, says he remains...
By Kevin Davies, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 03.27.2025
Aggregated News
Around 2018–19, there was not a bigger science and ethical story than the debate over heritable human genome editing (HHGE) and the scandal over the “CRISPR babies.” The scientist, He Jiankui, who attempted to engineer the germline of human embryos...
WASHINGTON — Keith Joung knows better than a lot of people what, exactly, it might require to prove to regulators and patients that CRISPR could be safely used to alter the genome of a human embryo. If, of course, society...
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