A controversial Chinese CRISPR scientist is still hopeful about embryo gene-editing. Here’s why.
Last Thursday, JK, who was released from prison in 2022, sat down with Antonio and Mat Honan, our editor in chief, for a live broadcast conversation on the experiment, his current situation, and his plans for the future.
If you subscribe to MIT Technology Review, you can watch a recording of the conversation or read the transcript here. But if you don’t yet subscribe (and do consider it—I’m biased, but it’s worth it), allow me to recap some of the highlights of what JK shared.
His life has been eventful since he came out of prison. JK sought to live in Hong Kong but was rejected by its government; he publicly declared he would set up a nonprofit lab in Beijing, but that hasn’t happened yet; he was hired to lead a genetic-medicine research institution at Wuchang University of Technology, a private university in Wuhan, but he seems to have been let go again. Now, according to Stat News, he has relocated to Hainan, China’s southernmost island province, and started a lab there.
During the MIT Technology Review conversation, JK confirmed that he’s currently in Hainan and working on using gene-editing technology to cure genetic diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD).
He’s currently funded by private donations from Chinese and American companies, although he refused to name them. Some have even offered to pay him to travel to obscure countries with lax regulations to continue his previous work, but he turned them down. He would much prefer to return to academia to do research, JK said, but he can still conduct scientific research at a private company.
For now, he’s planning to experiment only on mice, monkeys, and nonviable human embryos, JK said.
His experiment in 2018 inspired China to come out with regulations that explicitly forbid gene editing for reproductive uses. Today, implanting an edited embryo into a human is a crime subject to up to seven years in prison. JK repeatedly said all his current work will “comply with all the laws, regulations, and international ethics” but shied away from answering a question on what he thinks regulation around gene editing should look like.
