The Scientist Who Edited Babies to Block HIV May Have Tried to Make Them Smarter
He removed the doorway HIV uses to enter cells, which is supposedly linked to memory circuits, though it is unclear whether that mattered here.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Andrew Huberman - The Frontier of Neurotechnology - [Invest Like the Best, EP.494]A few years ago, He Jiankui, a Stanford trained scientist running his own lab in China, stood up at a scientific meeting and said he had done it. Using CRISPR, molecular scissors that can cut and change DNA, he had altered twin babies before birth to delete the doorway HIV uses to get into cells.
The account going around, as retold by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, was that the babies' father carried HIV and He hoped to protect them from infection. Huberman says he does not know whether that account is true.
There was a frozen moment across medical science when no one knew whether He would receive a Nobel Prize or go to jail. He had simply gone ahead and edited human embryos that were carried to birth, doing in people what the technology allowed but ethics had held back.
People in the field reacted by digging through old emails with him and deciding whether to claim a connection or distance themselves. As outsiders scrutinized those exchanges, they sounded cautionary on the surface but kept asking whether the editing was working.
The world decided the work was wrong. The Chinese government moved to close his research operation and said he would face punishment. He is now reported to have a laboratory in Austin, Texas, though the neuroscientist says he does not know if that is true or how such a move could have happened.
The same doorway He removed to block HIV is supposedly linked to some aspects of how brain circuits form for memory, though it is unclear whether that link mattered here. The neuroscientist says everyone in his field knew about that second link but few talked about it openly.
That left an unanswered question: was He trying only to protect the twins from infection, or also trying to make them super smart. No one has answered it conclusively. Huberman raises it as speculation, the idea that people may already be editing genes not just to prevent disease but to try to boost mental or physical ability.
Questions people ask
What is CRISPR, exactly?
CRISPR is a system first found in bacteria that can be programmed to find a specific stretch of DNA and cut it. Scientists supply a guide that leads a cutting protein to the target, then the cell repairs the cut, which can disable a gene or insert a new sequence.
What is the HIV receptor that was deleted?
The best known one is called CCR5, a protein that sits on the surface of some white blood cells. HIV latches onto it to enter and infect the cell. Some people naturally carry a mutation that disables CCR5, and they are highly resistant to HIV infection.
Could a gene edit in babies be passed to their own children?
Yes. Changes made in an early embryo can end up in both body cells and eggs or sperm, so they can be inherited. That is why editing embryos is treated differently from treating one consenting patient, because the change could affect future generations.