Ferrell’s intention was obviously to orchestrate some headline news for Sangamo. But it was also a contingency plan: to build a relationship with a trusted medical reporter, making sure she knew the lead investigators in the event that there should be a serious adverse event in the trial. In Chicago, Ferrell asked Marchione if she was interested in working on another exclusive gene-editing story, this time nothing to do with Sangamo. This was a big one, he said, although he kept some cards close to his chest. In particular, he didn’t mention his dinner two months earlier with a Chinese scientist he’d worked with before, named He Jiankui, who was moving into clinical genome editing. Nor did he mention a bombshell email he’d just received from the same scientist, whom he called JK.I That email revealed that JK had done something no-one else had dare attempt. And now a woman was pregnant, carrying a genetically edited fetus.
Ferrell had received an offer to shape the public revelation of a medical milestone that would put the Sangamo story in the shade: the first genome editing of a human embryo resulting in a pregnancy and twin births. Ferrell was already contemplating leaving his Chicago-based PR agency. In July, he handed in his notice and a few weeks later, flew to Shenzhen, having accepted a short-term contract from JK to advise his group.II
Ferrell knew he could trust Marchione to tell the story of the CRISPR babies accurately and responsibly, even in the midst of what was sure to be an international media frenzy. In the second week of October, after a major Chinese national holiday, four China-based AP reporters visited JK’s lab at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen. While they interviewed JK, the photographer captured one of JK’s colleagues, embryologist Qin Jinzhou, injecting a human embryo with a CRISPR construct targeting a gene called PCSK9. JK told the reporters about the successful pregnancy, although the babies had not yet been born. On camera, he said defiantly: “The world has moved onto the stage for embryo genetic editing. There will be someone, somewhere who is doing this. If it’s not me, it will be someone else.”2
Marchione began drafting her exclusive story, keeping everything confidential, the timing of its release still to be determined. For her, the most profound aspect of JK’s experiment was “the enormity of the leap for humankind.” For the first time, a scientist had dared to rewrite the recipe of life, changing the script for this and future generations.3 Even after she got word of the twins’ birth, Marchione still needed confirmation of the births and evidence that JK had actually done what he was claiming. Although unlikely, scientists have been known to commit fraud. What if this was just one giant outrageous hoax?
JK planned to submit his research article detailing the editing and birth of the world’s first genetically edited babies to Nature. The first page of his manuscript listed ten coauthors, including JK’s American PhD mentor, Michael Deem, a professor at Rice University in Houston, Texas. JK was hoping that Nature would act with “Shenzhen speed” and rapidly review and publish the article. Shortly before the Hong Kong genome ethics summit in late November 2018, Ferrell sent Marchione a copy of JK’s draft manuscript. Lulu and Nana were test tube babies, conceived in a dish, their genetic makeup customized by a human hand using a fledgling gene-editing technology built around a billion-year-old bacterial enzyme. If true, she was holding literally the scoop of the century.
Marchione had no way of independently confirming the twin births—the identities of the children and their family, as well as their location, were a fiercely kept secret. But she had in mind to verify the results JK described in the manuscript. Both Marchione and her editors at AP insisted on doing things by the book. “We planned to publish only when—and if—we were satisfied that there was reasonable evidence that [JK’s] claim was legitimate, or if he made it public in some fashion,” she told me.4 With JK scheduled to speak at the summit, he would never have a better chance of commanding the world’s attention. How could JK resist the opportunity to pull the equivalent of a Steve Jobs mic drop: “And one more thing…”
Marchione sent extracts of the manuscript in confidence to a trio of medical and scientific experts—George Church, University of Pennsylvania cardiologist Kiran Musunuru, and Scripps Institute cardiologist Eric Topol. Musunuru said his heart sank as he opened the file. He called it “a soul-destroying moment.”5 This wasn’t a hoax. If anything, it was worse.
In the end, Marchione’s hand was forced. Shortly after touching down in Hong Kong, she got wind of a breaking story in MIT Technology Review. The reporter didn’t know about the births, but he knew that JK was on the verge of making history by overseeing a pregnancy using gene-edited embryos. By the time I arrived in Hong Kong on the eve of the summit, the world had changed. I spent the taxi ride to my hotel trying to keep calm as I saw a trending hashtag—#CRISPRbabies.
Antonio Regalado, a tenacious science reporter at MIT Technology Review, is tall and lean, with hollow cheeks and eyes befitting a journalist not averse to pulling an all-nighter in service of a scoop. With a physics degree from Yale, a degree from the New York University School of Journalism, and nine years at the Wall Street Journal, he has impeccable credentials. But he admits to drawing much of his inspiration from the supermarket tabloids. “This is my sensibility,” he says. “Are my stories worthy of Tech Review and Weekly World News?” Ideally, he wants his readers to come away from a story unsure if what they’ve just read is true. “But it is true! That’s the sweet spot for me.”6 Stanford’s Hank Greely quips: “He wants to be Woodward and Bernstein combined.”7
In pursuing a massive story such as editing human embryos, Regalado followed the advice Walter Gretzky once gave his precociously talented son, Wayne: “Skate to where the puck is going to be.” With eight of the first ten published reports of genome editing on human embryos emanating from labs in China, a country that seemingly lacked the legal restrictions or oversight of many countries in the West,8 Regalado was in no doubt where the first attempts to produce a gene-edited baby were going to take place. The opportunity to investigate his hunch came in October 2018, one month before the Hong Kong conference.
Regalado got the chance to tour China with a pair of documentary filmmakers, director Cody Sheehy and Samira Kiani, an Iranian expat physician-scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. Along with George Church and biohacker Josiah Zayner, Regalado was going to be a central character in their documentary, The Human Game.9 Providing ground support was Sheehy’s brother-in-law, Nicholas Shadid, a China-based consultant who spoke Mandarin. Shadid had scheduled interviews with scientists in Shanghai and Guangzhou, a city of 13 million people in southern China, including a visit to Sun Yat-sen University to interview one Huang Junjiu.10
In 2015, Huang published the first attempt to perform CRISPR genome editing on human embryos. He was motivated by the public health threat of thalassemia in his home city. His experiments were little more than a proof of principle: they had been conducted on malformed embryos rejected by an IVF clinic—“tripronuclear zygotes” in the trade—with no intention of implantation. The results were underwhelming. For all the supposed ease of use of CRISPR, Huang’s team reported only partial success in editing the target beta globin gene. Making matters worse, there was also evidence of random off-target edits in the genome.