Antonio Regalado: CRISPR babies 6 years later

Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning

Today Razib talks to Antonio Regalado, reporter at MIT Technology Review. Regalado covers how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before joining MIT Technology Review in 2011, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science and other publications. From 2000 to 2009, he was a science reporter and foreign correspondent at the Wall Street Journal.

Among the many stories Regalado has broken was the prenatal sequencing of Razib’s son in 2014, but on this episode they talk about another scoop: his 2018 reporting on the “CRISPR babies” (listen to a podcast on the topic with Regalado on The Insight). Starting in 2024, the scientist who led the 2018 gene-editing of two babies in China, He Jiankui, seemed to embrace a new role as self-appointed social media evangelist and oracle, mostly about his own future. Regalado talks about what he thinks the Chinese scientist is up to, where the field of CRISPR-gene editing is at present and where it is going. Razib and Regalado also discuss the rise and fall, and future prospects, of CRISPR biotech startups attempting to develop therapies that deploy gene-editing. Regalado also muses on the emergence of companies that provide genomic technologies and services like embryo screening in the “gray market” away from public view.