Beth Shapiro

And I think this was a story that was broken by a guy at MIT Tech Review a couple of days before it was announced, but he thought that he was going to be able to announce this to great fanfare in front of a community that was going to celebrate him for having done this.

And the story broke a few days early.

But he had set this up, a whole PR thing.

He had like YouTube videos that were ready to go to explain what he had done.

He wasn't trying to do it in secret.

He thought he was going to be a hero.

Right.

But people were like, holy shit, dude, what the fuck?

Like, no, we're not editing human germlines, the cells that will be passed on.

to the next generation.

There's still a moratorium against doing that work.

The baby that was just born, for example, they didn't edit any of his cells that would get passed on to the next generation.

It's only the cells in his body.

So those edits will only ever live in him.

And there's a difference between doing that.

And it's the second one that we're uncomfortable with.

But it didn't end up even being the right gene.

So the reason that this that he got whatever ethical permission he did in China to do this is because they were children that were born by IVF because the dad had AIDS.

And so what they were trying to do was create what he claimed he was trying to do was create an environment where they would never accidentally get it.

I guess if there's blood.