As I entered the impressive Lee Shau Kee Lecture Centre, I spied the jovial face of Lap-Chee Tsui, the vice chancellor of the university and one of the summit organizers. Thirty years earlier, working at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, Tsui led the discovery of the cystic fibrosis (CF) gene, teaming up with Francis Collins. It was a tour de force of genetic detective work, a lifeline for CF patients, and a magical moment for Tsui, who is originally from Taiwan. As a graduate student in Bob Williamson’s rival team in London hunting the CF gene, I’d enjoyed sharing a few beers with Tsui at various conferences. If anyone was going to scoop us, we thought, let it be him.
Tsui asked me what I thought of the magnificent venue as the audience began drifting in. He couldn’t resist telling me that he’d ordered the relocation of a reservoir serving more than 100,000 people in order to create space for this jewel of HKU’s centennial campus. Tsui’s success in literally the parting of the waters was impressive. But as Acts of God go, it was completely overshadowed by the revelations that were scheduled to take place on the stage in front of us.
The decision to hold the summit in Hong Kong was a compromise after the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the original hosts, pulled out. Feng Zhang suspected that the switch in venues signaled that the Chinese government probably knew about the CRISPR babies. “For some reason, [CAS] couldn’t find an auditorium to fit five hundred people in Beijing,” Zhang said sarcastically.1 However, this particular conspiracy theory doesn’t hold water: Tsui had received an official invitation to host the summit in December 2017, following months of exploratory talks, well before the fateful pregnancy.2
Taking my seat in the section roped off for the media near the back of the hall, the only question on my mind was whether JK was going to show up. By now, everyone had heard the news of the CRISPR babies, foreshadowing a dark new chapter in the annals of medicine. But Doudna, Tsui, and the other conference organizers had two urgent concerns: Was JK telling the truth in those extraordinary YouTube videos or was this an implausibly elaborate hoax? And was he still going to appear to talk about the experiments leading to the twin births?
To answer those questions, Doudna, Alta Charo, Robin Lovell-Badge, and University of Sydney developmental biologist Patrick Tam arranged to meet JK for dinner on the eve of the conference at Le Méridien Cyberport hotel, where most of the speakers were staying. “He arrived almost defiant,” Doudna recalled.3 For the next hour or so, Doudna and colleagues peppered JK with questions: Why had he chosen HIV? How were the families recruited? What was the informed consent process? Why was there no public disclosure of any preclinical data? JK tried to answer and gave a preview of his presentation, dropping the news that a second woman was also newly pregnant with a gene-edited baby.
Around the table, JK’s inquisitors were dismayed by his offhand demeanor—what Doudna described as a combination of hubris and naïveté4—his stubborn self-belief and refusal to concede any mistakes or ethical lapses. “I got the strong impression that he saw Robert Edwards as a kind of hero, a paradigm breaker, a disrupter, and that he wanted to model himself after that,” Charo said.5 But JK’s dreams of emulating Edwards were fading fast. “JK was hoping to make a big splash with the news of the twin birth,” Tam told me.6 He asked whether he should present the results when he gave his scheduled talk on Wednesday morning? “We were all like, ‘uh, yes’,” said Doudna. Eventually JK’s patience during the dinner interrogation wore thin. He left some cash on the table and walked out of the restaurant before checking out of the hotel.
As I observed the ceremonial photographs and formal opening speeches by, among others, Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, I was confused. There was no acknowledgement of the elephant in the room: no mention of He Jiankui or the scandal that had broken. The only reference to the swirling drama was an oblique comment from organizing committee chairman David Baltimore, who said that gene-editing tools would be used in the clinic in the future. “We may even hear about an attempt to apply human genome editing to human embryos,” he said coyly. Then, as if on cue, he brought up Brave New World: “Although Huxley could not have conceived of genome engineering… we should take to heart the warning implicit in that book.”
Later that morning, we heard the first direct rebuke from the podium of JK’s actions. It came surprisingly from a fellow countryman: Qiu Renzong, the eighty-five-year-old senior statesman of China’s bioethics community and a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Qiu wasted no time in condemning his countryman. “There is a convenient and practical method to prevent HIV infection,” he said. To resort to germline editing was like “shooting a bird with a cannon.” Qiu accused JK of violating China’s Ministry of Health regulations on assisted reproduction and questioned whether he had obtained the correct IRB approval. His final salvo sent shivers down my spine:
“How could Dr. He and [his] team change the gene pool of the human species without considering the need to consult other parts of the human species?”7
It was a mild surprise then when George Daley, the Dean of Harvard Medical School, offered a more measured, even conciliatory, perspective. “Just because the first steps [in germline editing] are missteps doesn’t mean we shouldn’t step back, restart, and think about a plausible and responsible pathway for clinical translation,” Daley said. Also speaking that day were Feng Zhang and Doudna. Zhang was mobbed outside the hall by a scrum of reporters after his talk, a smaller huddle around Doudna. But for once, neither of the CRISPR pioneers were the star attraction. The main event was still to come.
Twenty-four hours later, the atmosphere in the packed auditorium was electric. Almost three hundred journalists, photographers, and film crews had by this time descended on Hong Kong to capture science history. The photographers and camera crews were herded into a media pen extending along one entire wall of the auditorium—far more than I remember attending the reasonably historic announcement of the Human Genome Project in June 2000. The organizers shuffled the program to devote sixty minutes exclusively to JK before lunch. Shortly before JK was scheduled to appear, I skipped down the aisle steps past the banks of photographers to the microphone in front of the stage to ask a question. It was just a ruse so I could slip into one of the few empty seats in the front row, where I sat next to Hong Kong’s most famous geneticist, Dennis Lo. I briefly wondered if security might come and have a word, but they had more pressing concerns.
As Robin Lovell-Badge from the Crick Institute prepared to introduce JK, I noticed the security guards stationed at both ends of the stage, a surreal indicator of the extraordinary event about to unfold. As a rookie editor at Nature, I had published Lovell-Badge’s career-making discovery—the identity of the male sex-determining gene on the Y chromosome—in 1991. Sounding like the headmaster of an English boarding school, Lovell-Badge warned the audience to be polite and even show JK some respect. HKU has a strong tradition of free speech, he said. Any outbursts from the audience would result in the session being cut short. As Lovell-Badge invited JK to come to the stage, there was an awkward pause that lasted thirty seconds as if, even at the last minute, JK had changed his mind.
When a side door opened, hundreds of people craned their necks to get a first glimpse of the man of the hour. As JK climbed the stairs stage right, there was a hush in the hall and almost no applause—just the clatter of high-speed camera shutters and the stroboscopic flashes from the legions of photographers camped on the opposite side of the hall. JK walked briskly across the stage, dressed casually in an open-neck shirt, carrying a tan leather briefcase. He looked more like a commuter hurrying to catch the Star Ferry in the Hong Kong humidity than a scientist at the center of a massive international storm. At the podium, he shook Lovell-Badge’s hand, and took in the scene. He’d imagined giving a lecture to a worldwide audience in front of Nobel laureates and scores of cameras, but not like this.