Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Mutant Timeline
- Prologue : The World On Notice
- 1 I’m Quite Glad That I Wasn’T First
- 2 The China Dream
- 3 The Best Humans haven't been Produced Yet
- 4 Winner Takes All
- 5 Look at those Muscles, Look at that Butt
- 6 A Moral Choice
- 7 Will I have to Mortgage My House?
- 8 The Cancer Moonshot
- 9 Free Health Care for All
- 10 Silence = Death
- 11 Immortality has to be the Goal
- 12 I don't want to Walk. I want to Fly
- 13 High-Quality Children
- 14 #Transracial
- 15 American Medicine and only for You
- 16 He was Busy, Busy. Always doing Research
- 17 A Hammer, Looking for a Nail
- 18 Beautiful Lies
- 19 Two Healthy Baby Girls?
- 20 Mixed Wisdom
- 21 They are Moving Forward
- 22 Chinese Scientists are Creating Crispr Babies
- 23 Bubbles Vanishing into Air
- 24 The Hourse has Already Bolted
- Epilogue: We have Never Been Human
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
21 - They are Moving Forward
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Mutant Timeline
- Prologue : The World On Notice
- 1 I’m Quite Glad That I Wasn’T First
- 2 The China Dream
- 3 The Best Humans haven't been Produced Yet
- 4 Winner Takes All
- 5 Look at those Muscles, Look at that Butt
- 6 A Moral Choice
- 7 Will I have to Mortgage My House?
- 8 The Cancer Moonshot
- 9 Free Health Care for All
- 10 Silence = Death
- 11 Immortality has to be the Goal
- 12 I don't want to Walk. I want to Fly
- 13 High-Quality Children
- 14 #Transracial
- 15 American Medicine and only for You
- 16 He was Busy, Busy. Always doing Research
- 17 A Hammer, Looking for a Nail
- 18 Beautiful Lies
- 19 Two Healthy Baby Girls?
- 20 Mixed Wisdom
- 21 They are Moving Forward
- 22 Chinese Scientists are Creating Crispr Babies
- 23 Bubbles Vanishing into Air
- 24 The Hourse has Already Bolted
- Epilogue: We have Never Been Human
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Discontent was brewing among the laboratory staffback in Shenzhen. Dr. He was on the road—traveling to Beijing, California, and Hainan to tell trusted supporters about the birth and to plan grand new ventures—while the laboratory staffwere still trying to figure out if the babies would be okay. He was charging ahead at a moment when care and caution should have been taken. The twins remained in hospital incubators, wearing masks to help them breathe, while the laboratory ran tests and crunched numbers. The technicians were still poring over their DNA sequences, trying to see if the babies suffered any genetic damage from the experiment.
The lab had been preparing for a birth in late November or early December. When the delivery came prematurely, everyone had to scramble—readjusting the time they were dedicating to other projects, shifting to new urgent priorities. The genome editing summit in Hong Kong was just weeks away, scheduled to kick offon Monday, November 27, 2018. Pressure was mounting to analyze the data and submit a paper for publication. The staffreasoned that it would take at least ninety days to make sure that the twins were healthy and to prepare the paper. Through a variety of tactics—diplomacy, subtle persuasion, and open confrontation—the laboratory team tried to convince Dr. He to slow down his publication timeline. In spite of their urging, he kept pushing for speed.
As the DNA sequencing data from the twins trickled back into the laboratory, it fell primarily on the shoulders of one person to make sense of the code. A star undergraduate student in Dr. He's bioinformatics course, whom I will call Goran, was hired into the laboratory straight after graduation. The young computer whiz spent long hours hunched over his keyboard in a tiny office on the SUSTech campus he shared with a junior bioinformatics technician and the contact person for patients in the study. His lab mates thought of Goran as wise beyond his years. When Ryan Ferrell joined the team, the young technician slid his computer over so that the pair could share a desk. Goran liked to keep his sideburns long, down past his jawline. He routinely wore earbuds with music playing—even when Dr. He would sit down to have a one-on-one chat.
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- The Mutant ProjectInside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans, pp. 220 - 229Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2021