AI Performance Task

The First Edit

In November 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui announced that he had done something no researcher had done before: he had used a gene-editing technology called CRISPR to alter the DNA of two human embryos, which had since been born as healthy twin girls. He said his goal was to disable a gene that makes people susceptible to HIV, giving the children a built-in resistance to the virus. The global scientific community reacted with near-unanimous condemnation. He had performed the edits without adequate oversight, had misled the hospital ethics board that nominally approved the research, and had made permanent, heritable changes to the human germline — meaning the edits could be passed to future generations. He was eventually sentenced to three years in prison by Chinese authorities. Most scientists agreed he had acted recklessly. Stanford bioethicist Hank Greely called it "unfortunate, ill-timed, and probably illegal" — but added that the science itself had worked, which he said made the ethical questions harder, not easier. Fewer were willing to say clearly what made the act itself wrong.

CRISPR — Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats — is a molecular tool that allows scientists to locate and alter specific sequences of DNA with unprecedented precision. Its potential medical applications are genuinely extraordinary: eliminating inherited diseases like sickle cell anemia, Huntington's disease, and cystic fibrosis before birth. Clinical trials using CRISPR to treat existing patients are already underway — in 2023, the FDA approved the first CRISPR-based therapy for sickle cell disease, a condition that causes lifelong pain and significantly shortened life expectancy. But editing the genes of an embryo is categorically different from treating a living patient. Changes made to an embryo are heritable — meaning they are passed down biologically, altering not just one person but every descendant that person might have. The child cannot consent. Neither can the grandchildren.

What He Jiankui's case forced into the open was a question the scientific community had been avoiding: if CRISPR can eliminate diseases that cause real suffering, does choosing not to use it become its own kind of failure? Some bioethicists say yes — that refusing to act is still a choice, and people who suffer from preventable diseases pay the price of that caution. Others argue that permanently altering the human germline crosses a line that should not be crossed, because future generations cannot consent to changes made before they are born. Philosopher Françoise Baylis, who has written extensively on germline editing, argued that He's experiment treated future people as means to an end — tools for demonstrating what the technology could do — rather than as individuals with their own rights. He Jiankui did not create this dilemma. He simply made it impossible to ignore.