He has been warned by the Chinese authorities that gene editing is not allowed in human embryos for reproducing purposes and wants to help people with rare diseases

Following He’s announcement in 2018, the US National Academy of Medicine, the US National Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society concluded in a 2020 report that gene editing technology was not ready for use in human embryos destined to be implanted. In July 2021, a committee convened by the World Health Organization advised against heritable gene editing. According to a 2020 policy review, some 70 countries have laws against heritable genome editing.

He was hit hard and quickly. Members of the scientific community condemned his experiments as unethical and voiced their concerns about the babies’ health. He was put on suspension by the Chinese government for violating medical regulations. In December 2019, a Chinese court found He guilty of illegal medical practices and sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. Regulations prohibiting the modification of human embryos for reproductive purposes have been adopted by China in light of He’s experiment. He was released from prison in April.

In recent months, He has taken to Twitter and the Chinese social media platform Weibo to publicize his next steps. Previously a researcher at Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, He says he has started a new, independent lab in Beijing and wants to pursue gene therapy—an approach that attempts to correct inherited diseases by replacing faulty genes with new, healthy versions—as well as gene editing. He told WIRED that he wants to help families with rare diseases but also plans to treat people who already have the disorders, rather than prevent them by using heritable changes to embryos as he did with Crispr babies.

The first disease He wants to tackle is Duchenne muscular dystrophy, or DMD, a rare and devastating genetic disorder that causes gradual muscle loss and almost exclusively affects boys. He wrote in his email that they were suffering. “I want to help them.”

Making People Better: The Case of He Jiankui Back to Research in the Aftermath of His Prisoner’s Experiment

But his apparent return to science raises questions about whether researchers who engage in extreme misconduct should be accepted back into the scientific community, and how their subsequent work should be viewed.

The producer of the documentary Make People Better which chronicles the He affair says he has the persistence and patience to come back to research. There was no on-camera interview with He for the film, instead he recorded phone calls between himself and Benjamin Hurlbut, as well as promotional footage he’s hired a PR team. Since He’s release from prison, Kiani has had a handful of Zoom and email conversations with him. “I think he has some noble intentions, but he’s also a very ambitious person,” she says.

“This meeting has been very disappointing, notably the failure of He Jiankui to answer any questions,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, who attended the event.

A publicity stunt like today shows he doesn’t have much credibility with his peers, says an anthropologist at the University of Oxford.

Hours before the event, He wrote a tweet that he was not comfortable discussing his past work. He said that he was not ready to talk about his experience. He said he would no longer be attending the University of Oxford for interviews with Kirksey, as well as the Francis Crick Institute, where a meeting on ethics of germline editing is planned for March.

He needs to clarify details of his past experiments but Kirksey didn’t comment on the Oxford interviews. In 2018, the world learned that He had used CRISPR–Cas9 to edit a gene known as CCR5, which encodes an HIV co-receptor, with the goal of making the children resistant to the virus. The results of his intervention were twins and a baby born to separate parents. The parents had agreed to the treatment because the fathers were HIV-positive and the mothers were HIV-negative.

It is not known whether He’s previous work succeeded or left the children free from side effects. Without evidence of that, Kirksey remains sceptical about He’s future scientific plans.

The weekend event was hosted by the University of Kent, and was organized by the BioGovernance Commons initiative, which held monthly online meetings between academics in China and other parts of Europe, North America and Asia. He was with some 20 academics and students at a venue in central China where over 80 researchers from 13 countries attended virtually.

Researchers who attended the talk were disappointed. Franoise Baylis says that it was an insult to the organizers and participants to have used up the time with details and information that were not relevant. Baylis said He gave little information about his previous and current research endeavours.

Anna Lisa Ahlers, a social scientist and China studies scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, commended He on agreeing to speak to the group but says his presentation fell short of scientists’ expectations. I would have gotten the feeling that he is a salesman from his talk.

Some researchers worry that interest in He Jiankui is diverting attention away from more important ethical issues around heritable genome editing. “This event puts the spotlight on He Jiankui — Will he apologize? Is he displaying remorse?,” says Marcy Darnovsky, a public interest advocate on the social implications of human biotechnology at the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, California. She believes researchers should discuss if there is a medical justification for heritable genome editing.