The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson

Author:Walter Isaacson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

PART SIX CRISPR Babies

A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me.

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818

He Jiankui taking a selfie with Doudna at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Michael Deem

CHAPTER 37 He Jiankui

The eager entrepreneur

He Jiankui, the son of struggling rice farmers, was born in the Orwellian year 1984 and grew up in Xinhua, one of the poorest villages in a rural part of Hunan province in east-central China. The average family income there when he was a boy was $100 a year. His parents were so poor that they could not afford to buy him textbooks, so JiankuiI walked to a village bookstore to read them there. “I grew up in a small farming family,” he recalled. “I picked leeches from my legs every day in the summer. I will never forget my roots.”1

Jiankui’s childhood instilled in him a hunger for success and fame, so he heeded the exhortations on the posters and banners at his school that he should dedicate himself to pushing forward the frontier of science. He would indeed end up pushing that frontier, though less by great science than great eagerness.

Spurred by his belief that science was a patriotic pursuit, young Jiankui built a rudimentary physics laboratory at home, where he relentlessly conducted experiments. After doing well in school, he was tapped to go to the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, 575 miles to the east, where he majored in physics.

He applied to four graduate schools in the United States and was accepted by only one of them: Rice University in Houston. Studying under Professor Michael Deem, a genetic engineer who would later become the subject of an ethics investigation, Jiankui became a star at creating computer simulations of biological systems. “Jiankui is a very high-impact student,” Deem said. “He has done a fantastic job here at Rice, and I am sure he will be highly successful in his career.”

Jiankui and Deem devised a mathematical model for predicting what strains of flu would emerge each year and, in September 2010, coauthored an undistinguished paper on CRISPR that showed how the spacer sequences matching viral DNA are formed.2 Popular, gregarious, and an eager networker, Jiankui became president of Rice’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association and an avid soccer player. “Rice is a place where you can really enjoy graduate school,” he told the university magazine. “Outside of the lab, there’s a lot to do. Oh, my God, Rice has six soccer fields! That’s awesome.”3

He got his PhD in physics but then decided that the future was in biology. Deem allowed him to go to conferences around the country and provided an introduction to the Stanford bioengineer Stephen Quake, who invited Jiankui to become a postdoc in his lab. Colleagues there remember him as funny and energetic, with a Texas-size passion for entrepreneurship.

Quake had founded a company to commercialize a gene-sequencing technology that he had developed, but it began sliding into bankruptcy.

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