Before he agrees to be interviewed, He Jiankui has one request: that he is introduced as a ‘gene editing pioneer’. This may come across as grandiose, but it is also indisputable. No one else in history, after all, can say they have created genetically edited human beings.

In 2018, He dropped the mother of all scientific bombs when he announced that he had used Crispr, a gene-editing technique, to alter the DNA of two babies. In a YouTube video, He........

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