James' World 2

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He Jiankui, a young Chinese scientist known to his American colleagues as JK, dreamed of remaking humanity by exploiting the emergent technology of gene editing. He had academic polish and an aptitude for securing institutional support. As a student, he had left China for the United States, where he did graduate work in physics at Rice and a postdoc in a bioengineering lab at Stanford. At the age of twenty-eight, he was recruited into a prestigious Chinese government program for foreign-educated talent and was offered a founding position in the biology department of the Southern University of Science and Technology.

SUSTech was a newly created research institute in Shenzhen, a city in the midst of a biotech boom. JK, who arrived in 2012, likened Shenzhen’s startup culture to that of Silicon Valley—bold creativity was encouraged, and there was plenty of capital on hand. With colleagues from his lab, he often held brainstorming sessions at a café near campus, delineating his plans. In the first ten years, he would tackle a variety of genetic diseases; in the ten years after that, he’d extend the human life span to a hundred and twenty years. In a PowerPoint that he presented at the café, he wrote, “As a result of promoting genome editing, humanity is smarter, stronger, and healthier. Humanity enters an age of controlling destiny.”

JK’s agenda was spectacularly ambitious, and the pace he projected was aggressive—lifetimes of work in mere decades. To start, he would focus on what he believed was an achievable task: eradicating a disease governed by a single gene. He selected AIDS, an illness regarded in China as both pernicious and shameful but one for which there might be an elegant fix. H.I.V. enters human cells by way of a receptor created by a gene called CCR5. JK planned to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to disrupt CCR5 in human embryos, which would, in theory, render the babies impervious to infection.

The experiment required volunteers, and, through a chat group associated with an H.I.V./AIDS charity, he began recruiting couples: H.I.V.-positive men married to uninfected women. Chinese law denies in-vitro fertilization and adoption to H.I.V.-positive people, and natural conception carries a risk of transmission. For couples with an infected partner, JK’s program was a chance at parenthood. It promised confidentiality, which was critical for a marginalized community; an H.I.V. diagnosis in China can cost a person his job. The treatments would take place discreetly, at facilities where only key employees were aware of the experiment.

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