He Jiankui, seven years after the CRISPR babies

In December, a Financial Times profile found He Jiankui standing in a gallery at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, a setting far from the laboratories where he once worked, and the article’s title made the point its subject has been making for years: he has not stopped. Seven years after he announced the birth of the world’s first gene-edited babies, served a prison sentence for it, and became the defining cautionary tale of modern bioethics, He is back in public life, surrounded by the attention he once tried to control. The profile is the latest chapter in a story that the scientific community long assumed had ended.

The beginning of the story is now well established. In November 2018, He, then a researcher at a university in Shenzhen, announced that twin girls had been born from embryos whose genomes he had edited with CRISPR, altering the CCR5 gene in an attempt to make them resistant to HIV. The announcement, made before the work had been peer-reviewed or ethically approved, set off a global uproar: the experiment violated the international consensus against heritable genome editing and bypassed every governance mechanism in the field. Weeks later, at a summit in Hong Kong, He apologised publicly while defending the science, and the apology satisfied no one.

The legal reckoning followed. In December 2019, a court in Shenzhen convicted He of practising medicine without qualification, sentenced him to three years in prison and fined him three million yuan. The sentence was widely read as a message: the state would not tolerate unapproved germline editing, and the incident led directly to a tightening of China’s regulations on heritable genome editing, bringing its governance broadly in line with the international norm He had breached. He was released in 2022, and the scientific establishment, for the most part, closed the book.

He, however, did not. After his release he resurfaced on overseas social media, presenting himself as a researcher continuing his mission, and the appearances drew a mixture of fascination and alarm. In April 2025 the story took a new turn: He announced the founding of a new company, Cathy Medicine, and married a woman named Cathy Tie, a social media personality who celebrated the union online. The pairing was received with the scepticism it invited, and by July Tie announced the marriage was over, three months after it began.

The autumn brought the strangest chapter yet. In November, Nature reported that Tie, now described as He’s former wife, had founded an American company, Manhattan Genomics, declaring that it was time to reconsider the CRISPR babies, a project He had disavowed in public statements since prison. The report placed the couple’s entanglement at the centre of a debate the field thought it had settled. He, for his part, told the FT in December that he still believed in the potential of gene editing, and that he had no regrets about the science itself.

The outcome of the affair is, in a narrow legal sense, complete: the sentence was served, the fine paid, the regulations rewritten. In every other sense it remains open. The children born of the experiment are growing up, their fate a private matter the public record cannot follow; the field of germline editing has advanced cautiously under the shadow of the scandal; and the man at the centre of it, seven years on, has found his way back into the public’s line of sight, at galleries, in profiles, in the margins of a new controversy involving his former partner. He Jiankui is no longer a scientist with a laboratory. He has become something stranger, a figure the story cannot quite conclude, and the questions his experiment raised about the limits of science, the governance of it, and the pull of the attention it generates, are still, seven years later, unanswered.