Reactions to JK’s incarceration ran the gamut. “What JK did was criminaclass="underline" he broke laws of ethics and medicine, endangered lives, and stained an entire field for no reason other than hubris,” Urnov said. “What needs to be imprisoned, metaphorically speaking, is the entire enterprise of human embryo editing for reproductive purposes.”6 Doudna took a slightly more diplomatic tone. “As a scientist, one does not like to see scientists going to jail, but this was an unusual case,” she said.7 “Jail isn’t the right punishment [for JK], but just because we can do something with science doesn’t mean we should,” tweeted Scott Gottlieb, the ex–FDA commissioner. William Hurlbut expressed mixed feelings. “Sad story—everyone lost in this (JK, his family, his colleagues, and his country), but the one gain is that the world is awakened to the seriousness of our advancing genetic technologies,” he wrote.8
And then there was Josiah Zayner, the face of the biohacker community. Zayner sought to frame JK’s transgression as a minor speed bump on the road to human germline engineering, insisting the Chinese scientist would be remembered more than any scientist of his day. “As long as the children He Jiankui engineered haven’t been harmed by the experiment, he is just a scientist who forged some documents to convince medical doctors to implant gene-edited embryos. The four-minute mile of human genetic engineering has been broken. It will happen again.”9
So who is right? Zayner the biohacker, who believes that thousands of edited human embryos will be born during this century? Or Urnov, the creator of GMO humans, who insists that germline editing is a classic case of “a solution in search of a problem”?
From the instant his name hit the headlines, He Jiankui was branded a rogue scientist. Writing in the New York Times, Eric Topol said JK should be “castigated” and warned that there was no “foolproof way to rein in such rogue efforts.”10 In Hong Kong, Harvard Medical School dean George Daley said, “scientists who go rogue carry a deep cost to the scientific community.” JK’s university, hospital, and the Chinese authorities swiftly denied any knowledge of, or responsibility for, his actions. The picture of JK as a rogue agent—secretly seeking fame and fortune, lusting obsessively like a young Jim Watson for a Nobel Prize for himself and glory for his proud nation—spanned the globe.
It’s a convenient narrative, but is this the full story? I have my doubts.
First, JK was not some anonymous researcher emerging from some shadowy secret lair but a highly recruited talent lavished with state and national funding. His commercial success and hungry ambitions in genome sequencing were widely feted and highly publicized. He was featured on state television on a program called “Extraordinary Guangdong” in a segment entitled “The new top shot in the gene world.”11 “Who gave him such very rare opportunity?” asked a group of Chinese bioethicists, suspecting the hidden support of influencers in the local or central government.12 JK kept a running photo diary on his WeChat account of his meetings with high-profile science celebrities and Chinese dignitaries that was worthy of a Kardashian. Deem, Quake, Mello, and more were there for all to see. Lombardi considered JK to be clever but naïve. “I feel bad for the guy,” he told me. “He got thrown under the bus by somebody. He wasn’t doing this alone. There was some entity who knew exactly what he was doing.”13
Second, China is famed for its high-tech statewide surveillance. “It’s almost as good at surveillance as Russia is at hacking,” says George Church, only half-joking. “It’s hard to believe the most exceptionally successful surveillance state would not be paying attention to the most amazing story in the history of biology, right?” Church is convinced that somebody in the Chinese government hierarchy was privy to JK’s work.14 JK publicly acknowledged the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology in his early embryo research. And we know that JK invited Yu Jun, a decorated scientist, BGI co-founder, and member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to sit in on at least one of his informed consent sessions with trial volunteers. In China, the needs of the state take precedence over those of the individuaclass="underline" Why should genomics and reproduction be any different? “Emperors have been ruling us for thousands of years,” BGI’s Wang Jian said. “I know the government is watching us at all times.”15 Would JK’s audacious activities be any exception?
Third, China has become a world leader in technology development. China’s massive investment in R&D—$300 billion in 2020—has made it a leader in 5G wireless communication, facial identification, artificial intelligence, high-speed rail, and many other areas of technology. In 2019, China successfully landed a lunar rover on the far side of the moon. “It is human nature to explore the unknown world,” said the head of China’s space program, as China spectacularly laid down another marker in the tightening race for technology supremacy.16
Genome editing technology is no exception. Chinese scientists did not develop CRISPR, but they have wasted no time pushing it into the clinic despite concerns of a “Wild East” approach to clinical gene editing.17 The first patients treated with CRISPR were at the No. 105 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army in Hefei. By the end of 2017, almost one hundred patients in China had been treated with CRISPR genome editing for various cancers including liver, lung, prostate, and blood. There is less emphasis on the sort of fussy regulatory checks demanded by the FDA or its European counterpart. While patients have died, if their deaths are not attributed to CRISPR or the trial protocol, they are not considered adverse events and thus go unreported.18 By contrast, the first three American cancer patients administered CRISPR gene therapy were not reported until 2020.
Fourth, bioethics is a relatively young scientific discipline, but in China the field didn’t begin until the Ministry of Health issued its first national guidelines on medical ethics in 1998.19 Without enforcement mechanisms and riven with corruption, this did little to deter the harvesting of organs from executed prisoners or the profusion of shady stem cell clinics.
As noted earlier, Chinese researchers published eight of the first ten studies on human embryo editing. Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported the first cloned primates20—a pair of macaques patriotically named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua—believing these could be useful animals in medical research. Yi Huso, research director at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Center for Bioethics, observed, “people are saying they can’t stop the train of mainland Chinese genetics because it’s going too fast.”21 Yi’s perspective was eerily prophetic: “We’re going to do it, then see what’s wrong, then fix it.”
In an article entitled “China will always be bad at bioethics,” Yangyang Cheng argued that one of the biggest cultural differences between East and West is the use of science to legitimize an authoritarian regime. While Jesse Gelsinger’s death set back the field of gene therapy by a decade, if it had occurred in China, “it would most likely have been either covered up or turned into propaganda depicting Gelsinger as a national martyr.”22
Finally, another contributing factor is China’s infamous one-child policy of social engineering and population control, launched by Mao Zedong in 1979. Before it was abandoned in 2015, the policy showcased China’s draconian determination to curb population growth and a totalitarian control over women’s reproductive rights. This was compounded by the Eugenics and Health Protection Law in 1995, which showed that China’s leaders were willing to impose measures not only to reduce overall births but also “new births of inferior quality.”23