Years before CRISPR Babies, This Man Was the First to Edit Human Embryos

December 14, 2018

(MIT Technology Review) – In 2015, Huang, a stem-cell researcher at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, first reported using the gene-editing tool CRISPR on human embryos. His paper was rejected by top Western journals on the grounds that it didn’t follow ethics rules and presented scant science, but that April it found its way into print in an obscure English-language publication in Beijing. The result was, in Chinese, xu?n rán dà b? (????), or “towering waves”—a sensational controversy.