Q&A: Embryo editing entrepreneur Cathy Tie closes one startup and begins another in biology’s most taboo frontier

Cathy Tie has an audacity more typical of a tech startup founder than a biotech executive. She dropped out of college to start a genetic screening company and later founded a telemedicine startup. The 29-year-old has been on two Forbes “30 under 30” lists (Editor’s note: Not always a good thing!) and calls herself “Biotech Barbie,” yet until recently, she hadn’t been on the radars of most people in biotech.

That changed last year when she announced her apparent marriage and subsequent breakup with He Jiankui, the infamous scientist who was jailed in China for using CRISPR to create the world’s first gene-edited babies in 2018. Tie’s relationship with a scientific pariah was quickly followed by the launch in August of a US company called the Manhattan Project.

The name was an unabashed reference to the US atomic bomb project, and the company’s goals were explosive: turning embryo editing — which is effectively banned in most countries, including the US — into a trillion-dollar business. It soon rebranded to Manhattan Genomics, but by December, it...