CRISPR People

A leading authority on the scientific, ethical, and legal aspects of genetic biotechnologies asks: What does the birth of gene-edited babies mean—for science and for all of us?

“An accessible, clearly written, fact-filled analysis of a new biological frontier.” —The Washington Post

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the cloning of Dolly the sheep was in 1996. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.

The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPRd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes the experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers the lessons we can draw from CRISPRd babies and from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next.

Greely doesnt mince words, describing He Jiankui’s experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.