2010s Digital Age · 2018
Gene Editing (CRISPR)
Designer Babies and Playing God
On 26 November 2018, on the eve of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, He Jiankui, a Chinese biophysicist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, announced that he had created the world's first gene-edited babies. Using CRISPR (a precise gene-editing tool that lets researchers cut and rewrite DNA at chosen locations), he had disabled a gene called CCR5 in two embryos that developed into twin girls. CCR5 encodes a protein HIV uses to enter human cells; He claimed he was protecting the children against the virus, though the edit also carries uncertain side-effects.
Ethicists and scientists condemned the experiment as a gross violation of medical ethics and a dangerous step toward "designer babies": embryos engineered for chosen traits, with changes passed on to every future generation. Francis Collins, then director of the US National Institutes of Health, called it "an epic scientific misadventure" and "profoundly unfortunate." The Summit's Organising Committee pointedly declined to endorse a blanket moratorium, preferring what it called a "translational pathway" for eventual regulated use. More than 100 civil-society groups and, in a March 2019 Nature letter led by Broad Institute geneticist Eric Lander, called for exactly that pause. A Shenzhen court sentenced He Jiankui to three years in prison (plus a ¥3 million fine and a lifetime ban from reproductive medicine) in December 2019.
The story did not end there. In December 2023, the US FDA approved Casgevy (exagamglogene autotemcel), the first CRISPR-based medicine, for sickle-cell disease — a painful and often fatal inherited blood disorder. The approval was a dramatic demonstration of the technology's legitimate therapeutic promise. He Jiankui was released in 2022 and by 2024 had reopened laboratories and resumed research, renewing debate about whether meaningful global governance of heritable gene editing has ever really been achieved.
Ethicists and scientists condemned the experiment as a gross violation of medical ethics and a dangerous step toward "designer babies": embryos engineered for chosen traits, with changes passed on to every future generation. Francis Collins, then director of the US National Institutes of Health, called it "an epic scientific misadventure" and "profoundly unfortunate." The Summit's Organising Committee pointedly declined to endorse a blanket moratorium, preferring what it called a "translational pathway" for eventual regulated use. More than 100 civil-society groups and, in a March 2019 Nature letter led by Broad Institute geneticist Eric Lander, called for exactly that pause. A Shenzhen court sentenced He Jiankui to three years in prison (plus a ¥3 million fine and a lifetime ban from reproductive medicine) in December 2019.
The story did not end there. In December 2023, the US FDA approved Casgevy (exagamglogene autotemcel), the first CRISPR-based medicine, for sickle-cell disease — a painful and often fatal inherited blood disorder. The approval was a dramatic demonstration of the technology's legitimate therapeutic promise. He Jiankui was released in 2022 and by 2024 had reopened laboratories and resumed research, renewing debate about whether meaningful global governance of heritable gene editing has ever really been achieved.