He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist who created the first gene-edited children, had been quiet since completing a three-year prison sentence in April, leaving many to wonder whether he had plans to return to scientific research. Earlier this month, we got his answer.
On Nov. 9, He posted photos to Twitter of himself sitting at a computer in a white office. “Today I moved in my new office in Beijing,” he wrote. “This is the first day for Jiankui He Lab.”
Videos and messages posted to He’s Weibo account indicate that it is located in the Daxing district of Beijing, and that it will be focused on developing affordable gene therapies. In another post on the Chinese social media app, he wrote that the first rare disease he’d like to tackle is Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
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On Nov. 4, He posted a letter written to him by the Global Observatory for Genome Editing, a collection of bioethicists, science historians, and other academics that fosters cross-community conversations about emerging biotechnologies, including CRISPR gene editing, with the capacity to transform what it means to be human. Signed by the observatory’s director, Sheila Jasanoff, and co-directors Benjamin Hurlbut and Krishanu Saha, it was an invitation to attend an in-person meeting in Cambridge, Mass., on May 14, 2022 and tell his side of the story about how the human genome-editing project came about.
