The first thing that Jiankoy told me is that, in exchange for granting an interview, journalists are usually asked to agree to refer to him as “a pioneer in the liberation of genes.”
I do not agree, of course. But I know enough of the notorious Chinese biological world to understand the reason for his desire to wash his bad reputation.
In 2007, he was a great student who left China to do postgraduate studies in some of the best American research universities; He arrived in Stanford in 2011. It was an hour -old campaign, at the University of California, Berkeley, a woman who has a strong claim like anyone else as “a pioneer in genes.” Her name is Jennifer Dodna, and in 2012, with her research partner, Emmanuel Sharbnarter, she discovered CRISB-Cas9, a tool that can change and delete human genes.
He did not work with our Doddna or Cherarnth-promising to China by early 2012 to become a professor as part of the “AT of the Thousand Talents Party” of the Communist Party, which motivates the most accomplished scientists, and teaching them abroad to return to the homeland. But the CRISPR-CAS9 research was announced. Anyone with knowledge and resources can use the tool.
This is exactly what he did, after six years. He used to do something that would eventually be condemned all over the world as very immoral-which will make him a three-year prison sentence in China for “illegal medical practices”.
In late November 2018, it was announced that the first children in the world have created the editing of genes-girls who were planted as designed for a few people born with: HIV immunity.
“They called me Chinese Frankstein,” he told me, 41 years old.
I am talking to him because now, after three years of leaving prison in China, and despite his inability to leave the country, he is planning to return in America. When we called the first video last month-was in Beijing, I was in New York-he told me that he was about to open a laboratory in Austin, Texas. He said that Alzheimer’s research – on unprecedented monkeys and human fetuses – would have been based on the hope of how to adjust human embryos a day in order to prevent disease.
Or at least, this was the plan.