Sci-fi or real? Is an age of genetically modified human babies ahead of us?

A Chinese scientist claims to have successfully employed the gene-editing technology for the birth of twin girls

Two years ago, Jennifer Doudna said, “I’ve mentally prepared for the day when I open my inbox, or answer my phone, and realise that somebody’s announcing the first CRISPR baby.” CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Well, she didn’t have to wait all that long. That claim came this Monday, from YouTube of all places.

In one of a series of linked videos (www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0vnOmFltc&t=2s) from The He Lab, He Jainkui, an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China, announced that he had used the gene-editing technology, CRISPR CAS9, to edit the genomes of