CRISPR Technology: A Science Fiction Reality That’s Now Knocking on Our Door

In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR to edit human embryos that resulted in the birth of genetically altered children. The changes were intended to reduce their susceptibility to HIV, but they also crossed a line the scientific community had spent years debating without expecting anyone to cross quite so soon: changes to the human germline, meaning alterations that could potentially be passed to future generations. The backlash was immediate. He was later convicted in China of illegal medical practice and sentenced to three years in prison. [SOURCE]

I wrote about him because his story landed squarely in territory that fascinates me as both a writer and someone who genuinely loves emerging technology. CRISPR has enormous therapeutic potential. The uncomfortable part begins when technical capability starts being mistaken for permission.

And He Jiankui has not disappeared from that conversation.

Since his release from prison in 2022, he has been trying to rebuild a scientific career around gene editing. His exact progress has sometimes been difficult for outside reporters to verify, but by early 2026 he was publicly describing plans to use embryo editing to introduce genetic variants intended to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In an interview with Wired, he said his current work remained at the cell-line stage but made no secret of his ambition to move eventually toward edited embryos and human trials if he can find a jurisdiction willing to approve them.

That makes his story more interesting to me now than it was when I first wrote this post, because the central question was never whether He Jiankui had learned his lesson.

It was whether we have learned anything from He Jiankui.

The Line He Crossed

There is an important distinction in gene editing that tends to get flattened whenever CRISPR enters the popular conversation.

Editing cells in an existing patient to treat disease is one thing. Editing an embryo in a way that may alter the genetic inheritance of a future person is another. The second decision reaches beyond the patient in front of you. It potentially reaches into generations of people who had no opportunity to consent to the experiment.

That was part of what made He’s 2018 work so explosive. The concern was not simply that somebody had used CRISPR. Researchers were already investigating gene editing for medical purposes. He had moved experimental germline editing into human reproduction before the scientific and ethical questions surrounding its safety and use had been remotely settled.

The technology makes the story possible, but the more unsettling part is human. Someone had to decide the existing safeguards were too cautious. Someone had to believe the potential benefit justified moving ahead. Someone had to decide that being first mattered enough to accept risks that would be carried, at least initially, by children who could not choose them.

That pattern extends well beyond genetics.

Treatment, Prevention, Enhancement

CRISPR becomes particularly difficult to talk about because many of its possibilities are genuinely wonderful.

If we can safely correct a mutation that causes a devastating disease, the moral case for doing so can seem fairly straightforward. Preventing suffering is one of the things medicine is supposed to do. But the edges get blurry quickly.

He now describes his proposed Alzheimer’s work as disease prevention rather than human enhancement. That distinction matters, but it does not settle the ethical problem. An embryo cannot consent. The effects of a heritable edit can extend beyond the person initially treated. Safety decisions become inseparable from questions about who gets to define acceptable risk and which interventions justify making permanent changes to a future person’s genome.

And eventually we run into a problem humans are very good at creating: definitions move.

What begins as treatment can become prevention. Prevention can expand into risk reduction. Then someone has to decide which risks matter enough to edit, which traits count as disease, and where reducing vulnerability ends and improving the person begins.

There probably won't be a giant flashing sign announcing that we have crossed from one category into another.

There will be meetings.

Why This Keeps Showing Up in My Fiction

This is exactly the kind of territory that pulled CRISPR into The Helix Chronicles.

In Broken Code, the danger is not that gene editing exists. The danger comes from people who become convinced that their ability to alter human biology gives them the right to decide what improvement should look like.

That distinction matters to me because I am not particularly interested in stories where technology itself is evil. Technology does what people design, permit, fund, normalize, and eventually find ways to justify.

Harper Brasfield spends much of the series fighting people who believe they are acting for a larger good. Some of them have compelling arguments. That's what makes them dangerous. Nobody needs much courage to resist a person twirling a mustache and announcing plans to destroy humanity. The harder problem is the person offering something genuinely beneficial and asking you to ignore what had to happen behind the curtain to make it possible.

He Jiankui’s story is obviously not my fictional conspiracy, and real children are involved in what he did. I don't use that casually as a plot comparison. What his case gives us is something more useful: a real example of how quickly the debate changes once someone stops asking hypothetically.

Before 2018, the world could discuss the ethics of genetically editing future generations as something we might eventually have to confront. Then someone did it.

The Question That Remains

I am still enormously optimistic about gene editing. CRISPR and the technologies developing around it may ultimately spare people from diseases that have devastated families for generations.

I want that future.

I also want the scientists building it to be challenged by other scientists. I want regulators asking irritating questions. I want ethicists in the room. I want people willing to slow down a breakthrough long enough to ask who carries the consequences if the person pushing hardest happens to be wrong.

He Jiankui’s return to this field doesn't prove that gene editing is too dangerous to pursue. If anything, I think it demonstrates why the argument cannot be reduced to being either “for” or “against” CRISPR.

The technology is going to keep getting better. Our ability to use it will expand. People with enough money, ambition, conviction, or desperation will keep testing the boundaries of what is allowed.

So the question that interested me when I first wrote this still does. Who gets to decide when we are ready? And perhaps more importantly, what happens when someone decides they don't need to ask?

Updated August 2026 to reflect subsequent developments.