Do we like He Jiankui?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A court conviction over experiments on real people and a push to resume embryo editing, with only a thin, unverified record of good to set against it.
He Jiankui is the Chinese biophysicist who, in 2018, announced he'd edited embryos to resist HIV, which led to the birth of twin girls and then a third baby. The world's scientists condemned it almost instantly. He went from lab-coat nobody to the face of the 'CRISPR babies' overnight, and he's been trying to find a way back ever since.
In December 2019 a Shenzhen court convicted him of practising medicine without a licence and gave him three years in prison and a 3 million yuan fine. The court said he and two colleagues fabricated ethical review documents, deliberately broke research rules and chased fame and profit. His two co-accused got lighter sentences. He finished his term in April 2022.
On the harm test, I found nothing from him on trans people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate, and no slide into conspiracy land. What I did find is a man who posted that ethics is holding back progress. He also called Silicon Valley IQ-boosting plans “a Nazi eugenic experiment”, and said he won't go against Chinese law. The worry is recklessness with real people, not culture-war grift.
The recent bit is the Alzheimer's plan. He told WIRED he wants to put a protective mutation into embryos, says he has raised about 50 million yuan with no government money, and hopes to run a trial somewhere with permissive rules, such as Hong Kong or South Africa. He says the Beijing work is currently on cell lines, mice and monkey embryos, and that it's legal. Back in 2025 MIT Technology Review reported that Chinese authorities were holding his passport.
The good stuff is thin and mostly his own account. After prison he opened a not-for-profit lab aimed at affordable gene therapy for rare diseases, starting with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A historian told STAT that work should give people pause, and he hasn't shared published results. That's a stated aim, not a verified good deed.
So where does that leave us? He's no culture-war bloke, and the science he's chasing is aimed at disease. But a court found he fabricated the paperwork that protected volunteers, and he's still talking about doing germline editing again. That's a mixed result on both tests, a close call, and a long way from a yes.