It’s time to step up the opposition to designer babies, says Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists working to develop gene therapies. A number of key opponents and skeptics are taking new steps to make their voices heard.
In May, the Global Observatory on Human Genome Editing, a university-based centre, organised an international summit on human genome editing. Unlike the previous three summits sponsored by national science academies, its considerations of heritable editing focused on the eugenic implications and other societal risks it would entail.
Soon after, three scientific and biotech industry organisations devoted to cell and gene therapies issued a joint call for a 10-year global ban on heritable genome editing, citing safety concerns, lack of medical need, and social and ethical risks. While a good number of biotech companies and organisations have consistently opposed heritable genome editing, a new joint statement by industry groups that represent thousands of scientists and major biotech companies is a significant development.
These developments bespeak the strength of the case against heritable genome editing. But advocates of heritable genome editing who command enormous financial resources are moving ahead with no regard for its safety, societal, or eugenic risks.
Tech billionaires and designer babies
This week, Bloomberg News reports that Bootstrap Bio, a company created about 18 months ago, has “hired a chief science officer, opened a lab and pivoted its work” to genetic editing of human embryos. Based on investor information, it says that Bootstrap Bio may be planning to launch human trials – that is, using altered embryos to initiate pregnancies – in 2026 or 2027 in Honduras, “a place where the company could potentially avoid US regulations.”
Bloomberg was unable to get comments from Bootstrap Bio CEO Chase Denecke or CTO Ben Korpan, but cites an online essay by the two founders about “gene editing adults to make them smarter.” It also spoke with Simone and Malcolm Collins, the rightwing pronatalists, about their investment in Bootstrap Bio and whether they would genetically modify their own children. “We’re going to be on that as soon as we can be,” she told Bloomberg News.
Bootstrap Bio is not alone. In early June, MIT Technology Review reported that Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase whose worth is estimated at $10 billion, had just posted on X that he is “ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos” and is “looking for gene-editing scientists and bioinformatics specialists to form a founding team” for the effort. “I think the time is right for the defining company in the US to be built in this area,” Armstrong posted.
Writing on his X account in April, he predicted that the “IVF clinic of the future will combine a handful of technologies” – embryo editing, lab-made eggs, artificial wombs, and polygenic testing of thousands of IVF embryos – which he terms “the Gattaca stack”. This is not Armstrong’s first venture that seeks to commercialise human biotechnologies; he is an investor in the controversial embryo-testing company Orchid (as is Anne Wojcicki, the co-founder and CEO of the now-bankrupt 23andMe).
According to MIT Tech Review, Armstrong has already convened scientists known to support heritable genome editing at “a kind of forbidden-technologies soiree.” One participant in that “off-the-record dinner” says that a venture group he helps run, SciFounders, is also considering starting an embryo-editing company.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Armstrong’s plans for a CRISPR-baby start-up is drawing support from scientists at the only two university-based labs in the United States that have worked on gene editing in embryos. One, Dieter Egli of Columbia University, whose team has briefed Armstrong, told MIT Tech Review that optimising embryo editing “is the kind of work that companies do”. Another, Paula Amato, works closely with Shoukrat Mitalipov at the Oregon Health and Science University and has served as the immediate past president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the fertility industry’s trade and professional organisation. Amato says that she would “welcome” a privately funded embryo editing effort, and “doesn’t mind if it comes from ‘tech bros’”. It’s worth noting that both Egli and Mitalipov have applied for patents for heritable genome editing.
An embryo-editing scientist and a fertility doctor push the case
As it happens, Amato is a coauthor of “The case for germline gene correction: state of the science”, featured in the July 2025 issue of Fertility & Sterility, the ASRM journal. Another co-author, Shoukhrat Mitalipov, is a push-the-envelope biologist known for his work on human cloning, mitochondrial replacement, and gene editing in human embryos. Amato has long worked with Mitalipov to acquire human eggs for his experiments.
The article reviews the results of gene-editing experiments in human embryos, and describes a raft of problems including unintended “large deletions”, “chromosome loss”. and “changes at locations other than the intended target site”. It’s hard to see this summary of the “state of the science” as a persuasive “case for germline gene correction”, as the title would have it. But the authors appear undeterred.
He Jiankui, “China’s Frankenstein”, is scrambling for a comeback
Meanwhile, He Jiankui, the scientist who presided over the creation of three genetically modified children in 2018, is striving to re-insert himself into the limelight and vowing to continue his attempts to create genetically modified babies. After being denounced as a rogue (including by mainstream scientists who support heritable genome editing in principle), He spent three years in a Chinese prison for illegal medical practices.
His prison sentence behind him, He has a new wife: Cathy Tie, a Chinese-Canadian bio-entrepreneur and former Thiel fellow whom Forbes has featured in two of its “30 Under 30” lists, as chronicled by MIT Technology Review in Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein”.
He also claims to have new money. In June, he told the South China Morning Post that US investors “were providing several million dollars’ worth of funding” and said on X that a meme coin he created with Tie, $GENE, is now worth a half million dollars, “comparable to the average NIH R01 grant”.
His X account, which has amassed almost 135,000 followers, has grown increasingly bizarre and grandiose. Recent posts include:
April 15: “Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”
April 16: “I literally went to prison for this shit.”
May 24: “The world owes me a Nobel prize.”
June 13: “I am the No. 1 scientist in China.”
June 17: “I will use $GENE to fund my gene research in my new lab in USA.”
June 20: “My mission is still in the field of embryonic genetic editing.”
He has said multiple times on his X account that he will set up a new lab in the US. But he is currently stuck in China because the government has seized his passport.
What next?
A number of tech billionaires are now using their considerable fortunes and unbounded arrogance to push forward with “the Gattaca stack”. They are recruiting scientists who are themselves willing to trample on even the tepid cautions set out by the “official” science academy-sponsored summits. They seem to have no qualms about ignoring both the near-global policy consensus against heritable genome editing and the widespread concerns about a techno-eugenic future that heritable genome editing would enable. In fact, they may consider a world of genetic haves and have-nots to be a prospect to eagerly embrace, rather than a future to avert at all costs.
In short, we’ve entered a new and more alarming phase in the struggle to orient human biotechnologies toward the common good, and to prevent their use in the service of a resurgent eugenics based in market incentives, genetic essentialism, and technological recklessness. It’s time to step up the opposition.
This article was originally published in Biopolitical Times and is republished with the kind permission of the author.
Image: Shutterstock (licensed purchase)