A Scientist Announces the First Gene-Edited Babies

In late November 2018, Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui stunned the global medical community by announcing the birth of twin girls whose genomes he had altered before implantation. The project, conducted in secrecy with collaborators Zhang Renli and Qin Jinzhou, offered in vitro fertilisation to couples with human immunodeficiency virus positive fathers and negative mothers. Using the gene-editing system known as CRISPR to modify human embryos, He sought to disable the CCR5 gene, a pathway commonly exploited by the virus to penetrate white blood cells. News of the experiment leaked on 25 November 2018 when the MIT Technology Review uncovered trial registry filings, prompting He to publish explanatory videos online.

He defended his findings three days later at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. While an initial domestic report briefly hailed the work as a disease-prevention milestone, prominent researchers condemned the procedure as reckless and unprecedented. Observers noted that standard, low-risk procedures like sperm washing already existed to shield infants from paternal transmission without permanent genetic alterations. Furthermore, the participants' consent forms were subsequently identified as misleading and legally inadequate, even mischaracterising the human embryo experiments as an attempt to develop an AIDS vaccine.