Image by Greg Baker / AFP via Getty / Futurism
That rogue scientist who created HIV-resistant designer babies is apparently gearing up for more human gene-editing research.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, He Jiankui said he wants to conduct human trials on his next big project: encoding genetics to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, a heritable illness, in future generations.
He identified South Africa, where the government declared in 2024 that it’s open to the “significant potential” of genetic editing, as a good place for those trials to take place. Before that, He wants to send two Chinese colleagues to the US to conduct trials on mice and monkeys. As the controversial researcher told the WSJ, he can’t go himself because his home country, which imprisoned him in 2019 for scientific misconduct and fraud over his gene-hacking experiments on human fetuses that were subsequently born, won’t renew his passport.
Aside from the broad strokes of a comeback, which seem to be more logistical in nature than anything else, we don’t know almost anything else about how He plans to start up again.
The self-styled “Chinese Darwin” has declined to identify his financial backers and doesn’t, as the WSJ notes, have any affiliations with any academic institution. When the newspaper tried to figure out who he may be working with in the US, it was unable to do so, and South Africa’s health department didn’t respond to requests for comment from WSJ reporters.
Lofty promises and opaque funding are, of course, nothing new to science. But He is no normal scientist, and as the newspaper notes, his reputation as “China’s Frankenstein” has followed the 41-year-old gene-hacking pioneer even after his release from prison last year. It’s no wonder he doesn’t want to reveal who’s funding him: they could, conceivably, be ostracized for doing so.
It also probably doesn’t help that He regularly posts photos of himself in his mysterious lab — which the Chinese government would not, the scientist insisted to the WSJ, allow foreign visitors to enter without permission — alongside cryptic declarations, including his claim that ethics are “holding back” science.
For all that creepiness, however, He clearly has heart. Peppered between self-aggrandizing posts are a number of shockingly egalitarian claims, including an insistence that “health is the universal human right” and that “‘Survival of the fittest’ is unfair for the people born with genetic disadvantages.”
“No one,” He wrote in the latter post, “should be left behind.”
That ethos in particular seems to be related to the seemingly personal inspiration behind the scientist’s latest avenue of research: his mother, who is in her late 60s, has Alzheimer’s that has progressed far enough that she no longer recognizes her infamous son.
If he can get human trials up and running, He wants to see if he can mimic a genetic mutation found in Icelanders who appear to have a protein that protects them against the debilitating cognitive disease. That’s a far cry from the admittedly reckless experiments he conducted on embryos — and it seems far less ethically dubious, too.
And what of the children born of those experiments? Their real identities aren’t know, but according to He, they’re healthy now.
“I will apologize only if the children have any health issues,” the scientist said. “So far, I don’t need to apologize to anyone.”
More on genetics: 23andMe Is Crumbling, and That Means Your Genetic Data Is Blowing in the Breeze
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