2025-11-27
7 分钟The Economist Hello, this is Alok Jha,
host of Babbage, our weekly podcast on science and technology.
Welcome to Editors Pics.
We've chosen an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist.
Please do have a listen.
Most stories about gene-edited children begin with Her-Jan Kwai, a rogue Chinese scientist,
who in 2018 announced that he had created the world's first such babies in secret.
His reckless and illegal act may soon fade into the background, though,
as new efforts to create gene-edited babies take off,
this time promoted and funded by the billionaires of Silicon Valley.
At the end of October,
a website appeared announcing preventive and American startup dedicated to altering human embryos using CRISPR,
a gene editing tool.
In a post on X, Lucas Harrington, the company's founder,
claimed to have raised $30 million for the venture,
which eventually turned out to have been sourced from America's tech elite,
including Brian Armstrong, a head of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, and Oliver Mulherin,
an Australian software engineer, and the husband of Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI.
On the company's website, Dr.
Harrington says preventive will at first focus on research to establish whether embryo editing is safe to do in humans,