Jiankui He: A Sorry Tale of High-Stakes Science

In response to news of the world’s first babies born in China from gene-edited embryos, Sam Sternberg, a CRISPR/Cas9 researcher at Columbia University, spoke for many when he said“I’ve long suspected that scientists, somewhere, would rush to claim the ‘prize’ of being first to apply CRISPR clinically to edit the DNA of human embryos, and use those embryos to establish pregnancies, but still, I’m shocked to find out it’s allegedly happened this quickly.”

There is considerable irony in Sternberg’s “shock” at the birth announcement by Jiankui He of the Southern University of Science and Technology in China, insofar as modern science (and especially frontier science) encourages competition, rewards high-performance (typically measured in terms of publications in high-impact journals, research dollars from prestigious granting agencies, lucrative patents, and promising start-ups), and celebrates “firsts” often with considerable pomp and ceremony. For chemistry, physics and physiology the most prestigious of these accolades is the Nobel Prize. As Ben Hurlbut, of Arizona State University, has remarked, He was “acting in line with” a scientific culture “that puts a premium on provocative research, celebrity...