Out of jail, is the CRISPR-baby scandal scientist at it again?
By Natasha Mitchell,
ABC [feat. CGS' Katie Hasson]
| 03. 17. 2023
Chinese scientist Dr Jiankui He flouted the law and bioethics basics to create the world's first CRISPR gene edited babies. Now out of jail, he's on Twitter recruiting patients and raising funds for more trials, this time in adults not embryos. An unhelpful distraction or a cautionary lesson for the world's scientists? Dr Joy Zhang has an extraordinary insider view after a recent encounter with Dr He. Dr Katie Hasson is part of a global Coalition to Stop Designer Babies, and runs a Missing Voices initiative to diversify who gets a say about heritable genome editing.
Listen to the full episode at the link!
Guests:
Dr Joy Zhang
Founding director, Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice
University of Kent, UK
Co-author, The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life Sciences (Manchester University Press, 2022)
Dr Katie Hasson
Associate Director
Center for Genetics and Society, USA
Further information:
Looking Back into the Future: CRISPR and Social Values (University of Kent report from meeting with Dr He Jiankui in February 2023)
The Third International Summit on Human Gene Editing, London, 2023 (livestream videos via the...
Related Articles
By Meagan Parrish, PharmaVoice | 10.10.2025
When CEO Ben Lamm steps into the spotlight, it’s usually to talk about his efforts bringing extinct animals back to life. Once a far-flung idea, Lamm and the company he heads, Colossal Biosciences, have proven they can pull it off...
By Daniel Hildebrand, The Humanist | 10.01.2025
When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like...
By Alondra Nelson, Science | 09.11.2025
In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months have made visible the stakes of the unchecked use...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...