On November 25, 2018, the MIT Technology Review broke a story that the international scientific community had been quietly dreading for several years. A researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen named He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the genomes of two human embryos, and that those embryos had been implanted, carried to term, and born as twin girls he code-named Lulu and Nana.
The genome editing had targeted the CCR5 gene, attempting to introduce a naturally-occurring variant called CCR5-delta-32 that confers resistance to HIV infection. The babies were the daughters of a couple in which the father was HIV-positive.
He had not published the work in a peer-reviewed journal. He had submitted his protocol to Chinese ethics review under disputed circumstances. He had recruited the parents through an HIV support organization without making clear to them what he was actually proposing. He had performed the editing without notifying his university or his collaborators. He had timed the announcement to coincide with the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, where he had been scheduled to present his work, and where his presentation became, instead, an international scandal.
This is what the news coverage of the time emphasized. He was a rogue scientist. He had violated multiple norms. He had endangered children. The scientific community closed ranks against him. The Chinese government, in a rare alignment with international scientific opinion, arrested him. In December 2019 he was convicted of "illegal medical practice" and sentenced to three years in prison.
The thing the news coverage did not emphasize, then or now, is what is actually true about the science.
What CRISPR Is, in 2026 Terms
CRISPR-Cas9 is a molecular tool, originally derived from bacterial immune systems, that can be used to make targeted edits to DNA in living cells. The basic mechanism is straightforward: a guide RNA molecule is designed to match a specific target sequence in the genome, the Cas9 enzyme follows the guide to that location, the enzyme cuts the DNA, and the cell's natural repair mechanisms either delete the cut sequence or replace it with a new sequence supplied by the experimenter.
In 2012, when Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published the foundational paper that opened CRISPR to human use, the technique was difficult, expensive, and unreliable. Editing a single gene in a mouse embryo took months of preparation, cost tens of thousands of dollars in reagents and lab time, and worked correctly perhaps half the time.
By 2018, when He Jiankui used the technique on human embryos, the cost had dropped by approximately 95 percent. Custom guide RNAs were available commercially for under $200. Cas9 enzyme was available from multiple commercial sources for a few hundred dollars per experiment. The procedure itself could be performed in any reasonably equipped molecular biology laboratory by anyone with a graduate-level training in the relevant techniques.
By 2026, the cost has dropped another order of magnitude. A custom CRISPR experiment that would have cost $50,000 in 2014 now costs under $1,000. The reagents are available for shipment to any address in the developed world. The protocols are documented in open-access papers. Online courses teach the techniques to anyone with the patience to learn them.
What was a frontier research capability twelve years ago is now a routine laboratory technique, and what was a routine laboratory technique is now approaching a hobbyist capability. Several so-called "biohacker" spaces in the United States and Europe offer CRISPR workshops to amateur enthusiasts. The DIY-bio community has been doing CRISPR experiments on bacteria and yeast for the better part of a decade. Human embryo editing requires more infrastructure — specifically, IVF clinics willing to perform the implantation — but the actual genome editing is no longer the bottleneck.
What He Jiankui Actually Did
The technical work He Jiankui performed was, by 2018 standards, not particularly difficult. He used commercially available reagents. He followed published protocols, with modifications appropriate to human embryonic cells. He used standard IVF procedures to implant the edited embryos. The Lulu and Nana cases were the first publicly announced instances of human germline editing — meaning edits that would be inherited by any future children of the twins — but the technical infrastructure for doing it had been in place for several years.
What was novel about He's work was not that he had achieved the editing. It was that he had chosen to do it, against the explicit norms of the international scientific community, in a clinical context, in human embryos, with the intent of producing live births. The other CRISPR researchers who could have done what He did had chosen not to, on the basis of voluntary professional restraint.
He's announcement at the Hong Kong summit produced two reactions. The first was the loud public condemnation that dominated the news cycle. The second, quieter reaction was a fairly anxious conversation among CRISPR researchers about what they would do if the voluntary moratorium on human germline editing broke down. Multiple senior scientists, including Doudna herself, used the months after the He announcement to publicly call for international regulation. The World Health Organization convened a panel. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released updated recommendations. Most major scientific societies issued statements.
None of these regulatory or normative responses had any binding force on any researcher anywhere in the world who chose to ignore them. The voluntary moratorium continued because most researchers continued to voluntarily comply with it. The infrastructure that would have prevented another He Jiankui from doing the same thing did not exist in 2018 and does not exist in 2026.
The Asilomar Moment That Didn't Happen
In 1975, in response to early concerns about recombinant DNA technology, the leading molecular biologists of the era gathered at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California and produced a voluntary moratorium on certain categories of dangerous experiments. The Asilomar Conference is sometimes cited as a model for how scientific communities can self-regulate emerging technologies before governments are forced to step in.
What the standard Asilomar story leaves out is that Asilomar worked, to the extent it worked, because the underlying technology in 1975 required institutional infrastructure that could be inspected and regulated. Recombinant DNA work required Biosafety Level 3 or 4 containment facilities, which were expensive to build, easy to inventory, and concentrated in a relatively small number of identifiable institutions. A voluntary moratorium could be enforced socially because all the relevant labs were known to each other.
CRISPR is structurally different. The reagents are commodified. The procedures can be performed in standard molecular biology labs that exist at thousands of institutions worldwide and in an unknown number of private facilities. There is no list of CRISPR labs. There is no infrastructure to inspect. There is no enforcement mechanism for any moratorium, voluntary or otherwise.
What this means in practice is that the voluntary moratorium on human germline editing depends on the personal ethics of every researcher with access to a CRISPR-capable lab. There are, by current estimates, tens of thousands of such researchers worldwide. The probability that all of them, indefinitely, will voluntarily comply with norms developed by international committees they have never met and which have no enforcement authority over them, is — to put it mildly — not high.
He Jiankui's primary contribution to history may turn out to be that he demonstrated the moratorium does not hold even when the cost of violating it is severe. He went to prison. He lost his university position. He was disgraced internationally. And the babies still exist. They are now in elementary school. The CCR5 edits are in their genomes. Any children they eventually have will inherit the edits. The germline modification, once made, cannot be undone.
What Happened After Prison
He Jiankui was released from prison in April 2022. Almost immediately, he began making public statements about his intention to resume work on genetic modifications, this time targeting Alzheimer's disease and the genetic conditions that produce muscular dystrophy and beta thalassemia.
He has not, as of this writing, announced any new clinical work. He has established a private research organization in Beijing called the Wuhan Research Institute for Genetic Diseases. He has held press conferences. He has given interviews. He has been actively working on what he describes as "preparatory" research on disease-relevant gene editing.
He has also, by some accounts, been in discussions with potential funders in Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and several smaller jurisdictions that have less restrictive regulatory regimes around human genetic modification. Whether any of these discussions has produced concrete plans is not publicly known. He has been notably more careful, since his release, about announcing things publicly.
In November 2023, the Russian Ministry of Health published draft guidelines that would permit certain forms of human germline editing for the prevention of severe inherited diseases. The guidelines were not widely reported in the Western press. They have not, as of 2026, been formally adopted, but they have not been retracted either.
In April 2025, a small clinic in the United Arab Emirates announced that it had begun providing what it described as "preimplantation genetic correction" services to wealthy international clients. The exact technical procedures the clinic uses have not been disclosed. The clinic operates outside any meaningful regulatory framework.
It is not currently known how many human germline-edited babies have been born since 2018. The number greater than two is publicly admitted; the actual number is almost certainly higher than the publicly admitted number; how much higher is a question that nobody who would know is in a position to say.
What This Means for Genesis Protocol-Style Fiction
I get asked, from time to time, whether the science in The Genesis Protocol is realistic. The novel involves a major biotech corporation, GenVault, that has developed a population-targeting bioweapon called THRESHOLD — an engineered pathogen designed to reduce global population by four billion people while being framed as a natural pandemic.
The general response in early reviews has been that the premise is gripping but improbable. The improbability, in most readers' minds, attaches to the corporate motive — why would any company actually want to reduce the global population, when their customer base depends on the population existing?
The science, by 2026 standards, is not the improbable part of the novel. The science is mostly extrapolation from technologies that exist today. Engineered pathogens with population-genetic targeting are within the reach of current state-level bioweapons programs, and increasingly within the reach of well-funded private actors. The CRISPR-based delivery vectors that would be required for THRESHOLD-style targeting are not significantly more sophisticated than what He Jiankui used in 2018. The IVF-adjacent reproductive infrastructure required to deploy the technology at scale already exists in dozens of countries.
The novel's premise is improbable not because the science is improbable but because the social arrangements that would prevent such a science from being deployed have been failing, in slow motion, since approximately the moment CRISPR was published in 2012. The He Jiankui incident demonstrated that the social arrangements were failing. The years since have demonstrated that the failure is continuing.
The worry that The Genesis Protocol dramatizes is not "what if a genetic technology that doesn't exist becomes possible." The worry is "what if the genetic technologies that already exist, and that are already getting cheaper every year, end up in the hands of people whose ethical commitments do not align with the welfare of the human population they are operating on." The He Jiankui case is the small version of that worry. The novel is the large version.
I do not think Sarah Chen's situation is around the corner. I think it is — given current trajectories in synthetic biology, CRISPR commodification, and the breakdown of international scientific self-regulation — closer than the readers who tell me the premise is improbable would like to believe.
He Jiankui edited two embryos. He went to prison. He got out. He has been working on the next iteration of the same project for the past four years. He is not the only person doing this kind of work. He is, as it happens, the only person doing it openly, which is one of the reasons he is also the only person who has been arrested for it.
The science has not slowed down. The regulatory infrastructure has not caught up. The thriller premise becomes more plausible every year. This is the world Sarah Chen is operating in, and it is not actually that different from the world we are operating in now.
Read her first chapter with that in mind.