India, May 11 -- It was at a CRISPR community event in Cupertino, that I overheard two scientists talking about the ethics of creating gene-edited embryos. As I expected, Dr He Jiankui was mentioned. The infamous scientist from China is in the Valley right now, looking for funding and support for a new commercial venture that is focused on lowering the risk of Alzheimer's disease through gene-editing research.

Ever since CRISPR had made gene-editing simpler and cheaper, the scientific community across the world had brought out regulations to prevent unethical experimenting on editing humans. Dr He Jiankui gained international infamy in 2018 when he announced that he had used a CRISPR machine on human embryos at a Chinese university lab, ...