When the first CRISPR-edited babies were revealed in China in 2018, the world reacted with a rare moment of almost universal agreement: this was too far, too fast. The scientist behind the experiment, He Jiankui, went to prison. Global moratoria were declared. Gene-edited children were filed away under the category of “never again” rather than “coming soon.” (PMC)
Seven years later, the taboo hasn’t disappeared – it’s being professionalized, branded and funded. A cluster of US startups is quietly turning heritable genome editing into a business plan, and Silicon Valley money is flowing in to help them try.
At the center of the latest storm is a San Francisco-based public-benefit corporation called Preventive, founded by CRISPR scientist Lucas Harrington. The company has raised about $30 million to explore whether human embryos can be safely edited “before birth” to prevent inherited disease – and, crucially, to pass those edits on to all future descendants. (Preventive)
Supporters call it the next frontier in medicine. Critics call it a dressed-up eugenics project. Either way, the race to redefine what counts as a “normal” human child has begun.
From sci-fi nightmare to Delaware corporation
On paper, Preventive looks like a very modern kind of utopian venture. It is incorporated in Delaware as Preventive Medicine PBC, a public-benefit corporation whose charter explicitly says its mission overrides simple profit maximization. (min.news)
In a public blog post announcing the company, Harrington describes Preventive’s mission this way:
to determine whether the newest generation of gene-editing technologies can be used safely and responsibly to correct devastating genetic conditions for future children. (Preventive)
The promise is seductive: correct deadly mutations in an embryo, implant it through IVF, and a child is born who never has to face that disease – and whose descendants never will either.
Harrington insists Preventive will proceed cautiously: staged experiments in cells, mice, primates and non-viable embryos; no rush to human pregnancies; a willingness to publish a negative conclusion if the technology proves too dangerous. (Preventive)
But the scale of the funding – $30 million, reportedly from an inner circle of tech and crypto elites including figures like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and other Silicon Valley billionaires – signals something more than academic curiosity. (nypost.com)
People don’t put that much money into a technology they never expect to use.
The transhumanist dream goes venture-backed
Preventive is not alone. This year has seen the open emergence of at least three US startups explicitly positioning themselves around the idea of gene-edited babies:
- Preventive in San Francisco, focused on “preventive gene editing” before birth. (Preventive)
- Manhattan Genomics in New York, led by entrepreneur Cathy Tie, aiming to correct harmful mutations in embryos to create disease-free children. (WIRED)
- Bootstrap Bio in California, raising money to edit embryos not just to remove disease risk, but potentially to enhance traits such as intelligence and physical robustness. (Genetic Literacy Project)
Around them orbit a second ring of “human enhancement companies” like Herasight, which already sells embryo-ranking services using polygenic scores that claim to predict future IQ, disease risk and other complex traits. (The Wall Street Journal)
That second ring matters, because it shows the direction of travel. Once you accept that it’s legitimate to rank IVF embryos by predicted intelligence or mental health profile, the step from “selecting” to “editing” is not a leap – it’s a product upgrade.
The ideological story behind all this is textbook transhumanism:
- Death is “the ultimate disease.”
- Biology is a legacy codebase that should be refactored.
- Reproduction is no longer a messy, private event – it’s an engineering problem with a roadmap.
That worldview has a natural home among a class of founders and investors who already think in terms of world-scale “problems” and “solutions,” preferably with their name attached. If you’ve already backed AI to remake knowledge, crypto to remake money, and longevity to remake aging, why not embryo editing to remake humanity?
A shadow named He Jiankui
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Every pitch deck in this space lives under the shadow of He Jiankui – the Chinese scientist who used CRISPR to edit the CCR5 gene in embryos, allegedly to make them resistant to HIV, and then used them to create pregnancies. The result: the first known gene-edited children, global outrage, and a three-year prison sentence for “illegal medical practices.” (PMC)
International bioethics bodies responded with urgent calls for moratoria on heritable genome editing. Many countries explicitly banned using edited embryos in pregnancies. In the US, a combination of FDA oversight and a long-standing congressional funding ban effectively blocks clinical use of gene-edited embryos, even as research rules remain fuzzier. (WIRED)
Preventive and its peers insist they are not repeating He’s experiment. They talk about preclinical safety research, transparency, ethical oversight, and working within regulatory frameworks. Yet leaked reports and media investigations indicate that at least some of these ventures are already scouting more permissive jurisdictions – including the UAE – where clinical trials involving edited embryos might be possible sooner than in the United States. (nypost.com)
So while the public messaging is about caution, the business logic points somewhere else:
If Western regulators won’t move, someone will go shopping for a different flag.
“Corporate eugenics” by another name
The core question is not whether it is technically possible to edit embryos. That question is being answered more clearly every year, as gene-editing tools like base editing and prime editing become more precise and powerful. (innolabs.ro)
The real question is: what happens when embryo editing becomes a commercial service?
Several disturbing dynamics are already visible:
- Inequality as a feature, not a bug
IVF plus embryo screening already costs tens of thousands of dollars and is heavily skewed toward affluent couples. Adding bespoke gene editing will not make it cheaper. We are not talking about universal public health here; we’re talking about early access for the rich, wrapped in the language of “ending genetic disease for everyone.” (The Wall Street Journal) - Soft eugenics via choice architecture
Companies like Herasight market themselves as empowering parents with more information. In practice, they bake a narrow definition of “desirable traits” into their scoring algorithms – health risks, IQ, height, even psychological markers – nudging clients toward a homogenous ideal. Add editing on top of that, and you’ve built an optimization engine for the human gene pool, driven by market preferences and venture-capital incentives. (The Wall Street Journal) - Ethics as branding
Public-benefit charters, advisory boards and blog posts about “responsible advancement” create an aura of moral seriousness. But they do not answer basic power questions: Who sets the target traits? Who owns the data? Who is liable when a “preventive edit” goes wrong 20 years later? - The irresistible tech-bro logic
Some investors are already claiming that once embryo editing is proven “safe,” its widespread adoption will be a “societal obligation.” In that framing, refusing to edit your child becomes the selfish choice. Having a “natural” baby turns into an act that must be defended. (The Wall Street Journal)
These are not fringe fears. Fyodor Urnov, a leading gene-editing scientist at UC Berkeley, has denounced heritable genome editing projects as dangerous and misguided, saying ventures in this area make him want to “howl with pain” and warning they will “cause zero good and formidable harm.” (view.inews.qq.com)
When the people who helped build the tools are begging you to stop, that should at least slow you down. Instead, it seems to be functioning as a marketing obstacle to be overcome.
The slippery line between therapy and upgrade
Defenders of Preventive and Manhattan Genomics respond with a simpler story: this is not about building “superbabies,” it’s about preventing horrific single-gene diseases – Huntington’s, cystic fibrosis, deadly metabolic disorders – in families who have run out of options. (WIRED)
There is truth in that. For a small number of conditions, every embryo a couple produces naturally will carry the same lethal mutation. In those situations, current embryo-selection techniques may not be enough; editing could, in principle, erase the problem at its source.
But the line between therapy and enhancement is not a brick wall; it is a sliding glass door on an oiled track.
- Editing to prevent a 90% lifetime risk of a devastating disease looks like therapy.
- Editing to shave a few percentage points off the risk of late-life heart disease? That already smells like enhancement.
- Editing to increase the probability of high educational attainment by a few points based on noisy polygenic scores? Now you’re selling a genetic version of elite tutoring.
In practice, once the tools exist and the market is primed, pressure will come from all sides to expand indications. Insurance companies, IVF clinics, ambitious parents, even governments will find reasons why this particular edit is in the “public interest.”
If you doubt that, look at how quickly embryo screening went from “ethically fraught” to “standard add-on package” in fertility clinics once someone proved people would pay for it. (The Wall Street Journal)
What “responsible” would actually require
The companies involved like to emphasize their commitment to “responsible” research and say they welcome regulation. If that’s true, then “responsible” has to mean more than blog posts and closed-door dinners with billionaires.
At minimum, it would require:
- An enforceable global moratorium on clinical use of heritable genome editing until safety, off-target effects and social impact are genuinely understood – not just by a startup’s in-house advisors, but by independent scientific bodies with no financial stake in the outcome. (PMC)
- Full transparency about funding, jurisdictions, trial designs and failure data. No secret embryo experiments, no shopping for the least restrictive regulator, no PR-driven science-by-press-release. (nypost.com)
- Democratic oversight that includes disabled communities, patient groups, ethicists, religious voices and the global South – not just the tech class and their favorite bioethicists.
- Firewalls between enhancement and therapy written into law: start with narrowly defined monogenic diseases, prohibit any editing for complex traits like intelligence, behavior or “productivity,” and revisit only via open political debate, not private board meetings. (WIRED)
Most importantly, it would require admitting that not every technology that can exist should exist.
That’s the line transhumanism refuses to draw. If death is just a bug in the code, then any tool that promises an edge against it becomes self-justifying. The absence of limits isn’t a bug; it’s the feature.
The real question
So the immediate question is not whether Preventive, Manhattan Genomics or Bootstrap Bio will succeed in making the first legally sanctioned gene-edited baby. They might not. Science is hard; regulators can still grow a spine.
The deeper question is whether we are willing to hand over something as fundamental as the genetic baseline of the human species to a handful of startups, however well-intentioned they claim to be.
If we are, then we should at least be honest about what that means. It means children conceived not just in love or desperation or accident, but in the shadow of risk scores, shareholder expectations and optimization functions. It means a world where “playing God” isn’t a warning anymore – it’s a pitch deck.
And it means that the next time a scientist stands up and announces, “We’ve made the first edited child,” it won’t come as a shock. It will come as a product launch.
Sources
- Lucas Harrington, “Announcing Preventive,” Preventive blog. (Preventive)
- Ground News / Reuters aggregation: “San Francisco Startup Raises $30M for Embryo Gene Editing Research.” (Ground News)
- Wall Street Journal summary: “Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned. Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway.” (The Wall Street Journal)
- Coverage of Preventive’s funding and backers (New York Post and other outlets). (nypost.com)
- Wired: “A New Startup Wants to Edit Human Embryos” (Manhattan Genomics). (WIRED)
- Genetic Literacy Project: reporting on Bootstrap Bio and “designer baby” ventures. (Genetic Literacy Project)
- Background on He Jiankui and the first gene-edited babies. (PMC)