Emily Glazer

Let's travel back to the summer.

It's late July.

We're in the Bay Area in San Francisco at this ultra luxury restaurant called Quince.

There was a whole group of Silicon Valley elite and scientists that were in a private room at the back of this restaurant, which had vintage Finnish furniture.

Brian Armstrong is there, wearing all black, kind of holding court.

And the evening kicked off with a central question for the attendees.

How might they bring the powerful and highly debated medical technology known as embryo editing to fruition?

It was basically called the embryo editing dinner.

Yes.

Well, a calendar invite that I reviewed that went out to attendees described as embryo editing dinner.

You know what?

It was actually neither of those.

It was we are going to edit an embryo.

Life as we know it?

There is a Chinese scientist named He Zhenkui, who in 2018 claimed to have done embryo editing.

He shocked the world with this news that he had produced children genetically altered as embryos to be immune to HIV.

As you perhaps could imagine, there were a lot of people that were very upset about this for a wide variety of reasons.

As recently as 2025, there was this whole coalition of scientists, biotech companies, patient advocates that called for a 10-year moratorium on trying to bring an edited embryo to term unless there's a whole global regulatory framework and consensus on ethical and safety issues.

All right, there's a bunch of things at play here.

Number one is what could pass on to future generations?