It’s been nearly three years since controversial Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison for gene-hacking human babies — and now, he appears to be hitting back at the rules that led to his punishment. … In a cryptic post on X that featured a photo of the scientist blankly staring directly into the camera, He wrote that “ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.”
After He announced that he’d created the world’s first so-called “CRISPR babies” and that they’d been born seemingly without defect, the experiments were widely denounced as unethical to the point of abomination. In 2019, the scientist was arrested in China and sentenced to three years in prison — and just 18 months after his release in April 2022, He was back in the lab working on how to use genetic editing to fight Alzheimer’s. … “Gene editing technology has the power to reshape the world,” He wrote in a November post, “like [the] nuclear bomb.”
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