Gene editing: The woman trying to genetically modify babies
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What is the concept of genetic editing for babies?
Imagine a world where parents can scroll through a menu of genetic traits before their child is even conceived, where hereditary diseases are eradicated and where the wealthy can buy a biological head start for their children. It sounds like a science fiction plot, but some gene editing entrepreneurs and start-ups are already at work and operating in a global regulatory wild west. British journalist, author and broadcaster Jenny Kleeman has been investigating this whole area. She joins me on the line. Morning, Jenny. Morning, David. You had a piece in The Guardian about this recently in which you wrote about a woman called Kathy Tai, who you described as a self-styled biotech Barbie. It's a really good article, really interesting, but kind of scary as well.
Could you just explain to us who is Kathy Tai?
Cathy Tai is a serial entrepreneur. She was a Thiel Fellow, which means that she accepted a fellowship from the entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the billionaire Peter Thiel, to drop out of university aged 18. So she never went to university and she started working in biotech startups. And she has a new startup that seeks to do germline gene editing. It seeks to be allowed to edit the genes of embryos and maybe eggs before they're implanted. And she says she's doing it in order to stop really serious diseases like sickle cell anemia or Huntington's disease. But she has a history of working for companies that want to use gene editing for other purposes. For example, only recently, she was the CEO of a company that made designer pets that was trying to make glow-in-the-dark bunny rabbits, trying to genetically engineer horses so that they become unicorns, things like that.
So she's shown that she is interested in the idea of using gene editing for enhancement as well as disease prevention.
Just explain to me how this germline editing works or how accurate it is. I mean, is the technology advanced to the stage where you could theoretically create a unicorn or whatever?
Well, I think creating a unicorn is quite difficult because it involves a lot of different genes. But the actual gene editing process isn't that difficult. If you're only looking to edit out or correct one gene, a very specific gene, there's a tool called CRISPR that's been around for 15 years now, which you don't need to be a particularly experienced biologists to use. If you know the right sequence of DNA, you can seek it out and change it. The actual technology is not that complicated to use. But what is complicated is the regulatory framework, because in most countries around the world, doing this on human embryos is banned.
Right. Now, Cathy Tai was briefly married to a Chinese biophysicist who was nicknamed China's Dr. Frankenstein. Tell us a bit about him.
Who is Kathy Tai and what is her role in gene editing?
Yes, he's called He Jun Kuei. He's one of the most notorious living scientists. And in 2018, he announced that he had created the world's first genetically engineered human beings. This was a pair of twins, girls called Lulu and Nana. And Lulu and Nana's biological father is HIV positive. He had tried to introduce... a gene editing that would give them inborn immunity to HIV. And he had tried to do this, but he'd actually failed. His own data showed that he failed. He changed their genes, but he didn't change the genes that he had intended to change. Nonetheless, even knowing this, he implanted the embryos. and in Lulu and Nana's mother. And Lulu and Nana exists now somewhere in China. China's very secretive about it.
And these two girls, who are about nine years old now, they are experiments. We don't know what their fate is. They have unknown consequences as a consequence of their genes being tinkered with. And He Zhengkui was actually in prison. There was an international outcry after he announced he'd done this, and he was sent to prison immediately. and fined around 300,000 US dollars. But he came out of prison and doubled down. He said that he believed that the future of humanity depended on the sort of gene editing that he was doing. He became a kind of internet sensation.
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