Such a scenario could prompt fierce backlash from the public and legislators—not unlike the clampdown on federal stem cell funding in the wake of the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1998 and overblown fears of human cloning. Other commentators saw reason to be worried. In a TEDx talk in 2015, UCLA stem cell biologist Paul Knoepfler reacted to the first Chinese report of editing in human embryos. “I think someone is going to go that extra step and continue the GM human embryo work and maybe make designer babies,” he predicted.20
Doudna’s biggest concern wasn’t so much the safety of CRISPR but the negative publicity that would accompany any rogue effort at germline editing, not to mention the government scrutiny that might shut down this new technology before it could help patients. In a discussion with NPR’s Joe Palca at Berkeley, Doudna discussed launching the debate around CRISPR and germline editing at a Napa retreat in January 2015. You can hold ethical debates, Palca said, but how are you going to stop somebody who is not here? “Apart from the lab police running around to stop them?” “I don’t even think we have the lab police,” Doudna replied to much laughter from the audience.21
But there was no laughing now. On the day after Thanksgiving—appropriately Black Friday—Doudna received a terse email from her acquaintance, He Jiankui, that left her feeling physically sick. The subject line read simply: “Babies Born.”22
She headed to the airport, while confiding the news with a very close circle of colleagues including Barrangou, who was on a family vacation in London. She was preparing for a Hong Kong showdown.
I. He Jiankui is widely known as “JK,” so for convenience I have used this abbreviation (it is not intended as a term of familiarity). It is Chinese convention to write surname before given name.
II. Pulitzer Prizes have been won for this type of medical reporting. In 2011, a pair of reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shared a Pulitzer for exclusive reporting on the life-saving genetic diagnosis of a boy named Nicholas Volker, who suffered a mystery autoimmune disease. By sequencing Volker’s genome, Howard Jacob and Liz Worthey identified a rare mutation. A bone marrow transplant almost certainly saved Volker’s life, mercifully ending a protracted diagnostic odyssey.
CHAPTER 15 THE BOY FROM XINHUA
The most common picture conveyed by the media of the unheralded scientist at the center of the #CRISPRbabies firestorm was that of a modern-day Victor Frankenstein, an unscrupulous rogue operator secretly experimenting on human embryos in his underground lair surrounded by flasks of colorful bubbling liquids and galvanic sparks of electricity. In other narratives, He Jiankui was a 21st century Sorcerer’s Apprentice, naïve, ambitious, reckless, and hopelessly out of his depth. But as more details emerged about JK’s confidants and movements leading up to 2018, we glimpsed a more complex, nuanced narrative. As one Chinese commentator suggested, “the story that emerges is more Elizabeth Holmes”—the disgraced founder of Theranos—“than Dr. Frankenstein.”1
So who is He Jiankui and where did he come from?
He Jiankui was born in 1984, of all years, in Xinhua, a small village in central Hunan province in southern China where the average income was just $2 a week. His parents were both farmers, working in the fields bordering the Yangtze river. In the summers, JK would have to pick leeches off his legs while helping his parents. He shone academically and attended the best high school in the region.2 Poor and with no political connections, his only way out was to excel in the gaokao, China’s punishing college entrance exam held over two consecutive days each June. He earned a coveted spot at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, the “Caltech of China.” With some 30 percent of graduates continuing their education abroad, USTC earned another nickname: “United States Training Center.”
JK enrolled at USTC in the summer of 2002, one year after the publication of the first draft of the human genome sequence. He wasn’t able to enroll in his first-choice program, but after a freshman year in the Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, he transfered to modern physics. His father bragged to the Chinese media that his son always came top of his class (although this may not be entirely true). Whenever JK came home, “everyone wanted to meet him and hear his tips for good grades.”3
In 2006, scholarship in hand, JK joined the flock of migrating USTC graduates heading to America, winning a PhD slot in the bioengineering program at Rice University in Houston. JK’s interests were shifting to the life sciences, believing that the golden age of physics had passed. He joined the lab of Michael Deem, who had studied at the real Caltech. Deem’s ambition was to define an example of Newton’s famous F=ma equation for biology. His diverse research interests—genetic engineering, mathematics, physics, and astronomy—suited JK. Together they coauthored five papers published in various physics and biology journals on an eclectic range of subjects, including the hierarchical evolution of animal body plans; the impact of globalization and recessions on the world trade network; and a computational analysis of emerging flu strains to guide vaccine development, another of Deem’s principal interests.
It was during his PhD that JK got his first taste of CRISPR—Deem and JK published a mathematical model of CRISPR arrays in 2010 in a respected physics journal. The paper, which had nothing to do with gene editing, featured lots of advanced mathematics that went over my head, including the Lebowitz-Gillespie algorithm, Latin hypercube sampling, and the Shannon entropy.4 Three months later, there was a double celebration. JK was awarded his PhD for his thesis, “Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems,” completed in very quick time. And he got married to Yan Zeng in the Rice University Chapel. A local Chinese-language newspaper, the Southern Chinese Daily News, covered the nuptials under this headline: “With outstanding morals, excellent academics, and infinite potential, a union for life complete with both good looks and scholarly talent.”
Soon thereafter, JK and his new bride moved to the Bay Area, where JK took up a postdoctoral position at Stanford University with leading biophysicist Stephen Quake, the entrepreneurial cofounder of a string of biotech companies including publicly traded Fluidigm, Verinata Health, a non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) platform, and a next-generation sequencing (NGS) company called Helicos.5 One colleague said Quake was “out to hunt death down and punch him in the face.”6 After developing the technology for a new NGS instrument, the Heliscope, Quake volunteered to be one of the first people to have his genome fully sequenced for an estimated $50,000.7 He posed for the cover of a biotech magazine in front of the state-of-the-art instrument,8 while a paper on the Quake genome, aka “Patient Zero,” appeared in the Lancet.9 His colleague Euan Ashley told Quake that he carried a gene that predisposed him to cardiomyopathy, but Quake wasn’t comfortable following all the well-intentioned medical advice. “We still haven’t found the compliance gene,” joked another colleague, Atul Butte.10
NGS, Quake said, was a cross between a microscope and a washing machine. Helicos was based on a proof-of-principle report that Quake published in 2003, describing the sequencing of “a ridiculously small” string of bases—four to be exact—along a single molecule of DNA. The article was spotted by a biotech entrepreneur named Stanley Lapidus, who flew out to San Francisco to persuade Quake to build a company around this embryonic single-molecule sequencing technology.