Fertility Inc.: The Embryo Editing Dinner
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Jess.
And Ryan. Tickets for our live show in Los Angeles are on sale now.
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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.
Our colleague Emily Glazer is describing a dinner she learned about a while ago. She talked to some of the people who were there.
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.
At the center of the group was the evening's host.
Brian Armstrong is there, wearing all black, kind of holding court.
Brian Armstrong is the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. the US's biggest crypto company.
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?
Embryo editing. Going into an embryo and tweaking its DNA. In other words, genetically engineering a baby. This was the idea that was on the table that night, along with the farm-to-table cuisine.
It was basically called the embryo editing dinner.
It was called the embryo editing dinner?
Yes. Well, a calendar invite that I reviewed that went out to attendees described as embryo editing dinner.
We asked Brian Armstrong for an interview, but through a representative, he declined. But the topic of the conversation, to be clear, was should we edit an embryo or can we edit an embryo?
What is the embryo editing dinner and who was involved?
You know what? It was actually neither of those. It was we are going to edit an embryo.
So one more big picture question before we dig into the details. What's at stake here?
Life as we know it?
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Friday, March 27th.
Coming up, one final story from the fringes of the fertility industry. And this one is very fringe. Today, Silicon Valley's quest to genetically engineer a baby
When it comes to reproductive technology, we are on the threshold of a new frontier. Today's gene editing techniques allow scientists to cut, edit, and insert DNA with remarkable precision. It's now possible to rewrite a child's genetic code before they're even born. But while this has been technically possible for a while now, it's only known to have been done once, by one scientist.
A Chinese researcher has shaken the international science community. He claims to have created the world's first genetically edited babies.
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.
The embryos were then implanted into the mother, and Lulu and Nana were born earlier this month.
As you perhaps could imagine, there were a lot of people that were very upset about this for a wide variety of reasons.
prominent scientists denounced He.
I mean, I think it's very disturbing. It's inappropriate. It goes against all of the guidelines that were established.
He Jinghui was sentenced to three years in prison by Chinese authorities. And today, many scientists and doctors remain convinced that embryo editing is not ready to unleash on the world.
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.
Why are people concerned about this technology?
All right, there's a bunch of things at play here. Number one is what could pass on to future generations?
When you edit an embryo, it changes that person's DNA.
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