At 3:30 p.m. on a Friday, Cathy Tie sat in Carnegie Hall, wearing a pink sweatsuit bedazzled with cherries, eating a gyro. Tonight was her 30th-birthday party. She’d had a bad year. So she rented out Zankel Hall, which, it turns out, is a thing you can do: Call Carnegie, get the rate sheet, send money. Done. Zankel is graciously wood-paneled with only slight vibrations rumbling up from the Seventh Avenue subway, and it was very empty. In the house seats: just Tie, Tie’s friends Peter and Michael, who would be playing piano and singing some opera; Tie’s videographer; Tie’s page-turner; and Tie’s piano teacher, who had her hair messily clipped on top of her head and a way of pressing her fingers into your arm that made your whole self relax. That evening, as the program stated, Tie would perform “Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor by Camille ­Saint-Saëns, bringing both technical rigor and expressive nuance.” Guests would be invited to “sing ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY’ TO CATHY!” The dress code: black tie. At the bottom of the program was the double- helix-inflected logo for Origin Genomics, Tie’s newest company. Its stated goal is to gene-edit embryos to prevent inherited disease.

Tie is very tall, with perfect skin and a poker face. Sometimes she stonewalls; sometimes she’s very direct. She is slightly pigeon-toed. “I’m going to change into my gown so I get used to it,” she told me. “You can meet me in my dressing room.”

The room had a sign on the door that read “Cathy Tie.” Inside was an upright piano and the videographer, who shot music videos for the Weeknd. A caped, sequined Jenny Packham ensemble lay on the couch. “Is this your dress?” I asked.

“Gown,” Tie corrected.

Tie went into the bathroom to change. Kate Middleton wore the same gown to a James Bond premiere. Tie’s gown was Champagne pink instead of gold. Tie wasn’t nervous, just tired, she said. Her last year had been a lot. It started with several trips to China, where she’d been born, though not raised. She wanted to explore her roots, she said. She wanted to eat Peking duck. She wanted to know how an authoritarian government approached the genomics industry. While there, she happened to fall in love with He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist who made himself infamous in 2018, when he revealed that not only had he gene-edited embryos — he’d implanted those embryos in women. This resulted in three babies (who have been kept out of the public eye) and three years for He in prison.

“One thing led to another,” Tie told a reporter from the Free Press of her relationship with He. They held a 12-person wedding, which Tie’s family did not attend. The MIT Technology Review labeled Tie the “Bride of ‘China’s Frankenstein.’ ” He started tweeting things like “Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”

That was April 2025. The next month, Tie packed up her Los Angeles apartment and boarded a flight back to Beijing. On a layover in Manila, airport officials informed Tie that China would not let her reenter the country. “I think that it’s ridiculous how a few........

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