Human 2.0: where Silicon Valley's attempt to rewrite DNA is headed

Techno-billionaires from Silicon Valley are actively investing in finding new ways to extend life. However, they are not only concerned about this - in San Francisco, with the support of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, a startup called Preventive has been secretly working for six months to create genetically "improved" babies using the latest DNA editing technologies. And he's not the only one. The idea is a noble one - to rid people of genetic diseases, but critics fear both failure and success of this venture.

French-born Emmanuel Charpentier has lived in five different countries and worked in a dozen scientific institutions, but her main passion has always been pathogenic bacteria, especially the streptococcus, Streptococcus pyogenes. It infects millions of people every year, often causing easily treatable infections such as tonsillitis and impetigo. However, it can also cause life-threatening sepsis and destroy the body's soft tissues, for which it has gained a reputation as a "flesh eater".

In 2011, while working at Umeå University in northern Sweden, she and her colleagues discovered a small ribonucleic acid (RNA) in Streptococcus that appeared to be an important element in regulating the bacteria's response to viral attack. It was used to create a Cas protein on a region of the bacterial genome known as CRISPR, which cleaves the DNA of the attacking virus. What's more, the system embedded part of the virus' DNA into itself so that the next time it encountered it, it would immediately recognize the aggressor and cut its DNA, thereby stopping the attack.

This mechanism of bacterial immunity, dubbed "genetic scissors," fascinated Charpentier's American colleague, biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who has also studied the workings of CRISPR/Cas.

So when the two lady scientists met by chance in a café during a scientific conference in Puerto Rico in 2011, they definitely had something to talk about over a cup of coffee, the Nobel Prize committee's website notes, calling the meeting "historic."

When they started working together, Charpentier and Doudna wondered: if CRISPR/Cas can target certain parts of DNA, can we modify it so that the "scissors" cut wherever we want? In 2012, they published a paper proving that this was possible, and in 2020 they won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Having picked up the development, other scientific teams soon showed that it was possible to insert another gene section in place of the excised one. To put it simply, the CRISPR/Cas method became a kind of editor for the "molecule of life" DNA, which allows you to edit it like a text, making cut/copy/paste.

And this idea, as it turned out, was very appealing to Silicon Valley tycoons. If we can edit the genetic code like a regular program, why not fix bugs and add features to create an "improved" human 2.0?

Strictly speaking, the idea of creating, as they were dubbed in the press, "designer" babies predates the invention of CRISPR/Cas.

In 2000, the parents of six-year-old Molly Nash, a patient with a rare genetic disease - Fanconi anemia - faced a terrible problem. Because of the disease, the girl's bone marrow was dying, which threatened her with death, and a compatible donor for transplantation could not be found.

Then they made an unorthodox decision - to do in vitro fertilization, create several embryos in vitro and select the one that did not carry the gene for Fanconi anemia and would be compatible with Molly's tissues to give her stem cells to rebuild her bone marrow. The embryo was then placed back into her mother's uterus and allowed to grow naturally. That's how Adam Nash, the first "designer" baby, was born. According to a Denver7 TV report, 17 years later, the Nash family was doing well, and the younger brother was (at least in words) proud to have "helped save" his sister.

Trying the situation on myself, I would say that I would be at least uncomfortable to realize that I was "made" not because my parents wanted a child, but for a specific purpose - to create a donor. This case makes clear what complex ethical conflicts the phenomenon of "designer" children generates. By the way, based on this story, the movie-drama "My Guardian Angel" starring Cameron Diaz was released in 2009.

The discovery of CRISPR/Cas takes the problem to a new level - theoretically, the method allows not just selecting embryos with the desired properties, but directly modifying them by removing undesirable traits and adding desirable ones, as the startup Colossal Biosciences is already doing with animal embryos.

But those are animals, and for human embryos, genetic modification to create a "designer" baby is illegal in the US and most other countries.

Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in 2018 that he had edited the genome of three embryos using CRISPR to make them resistant to HIV, resulting in two women giving birth to three children from HIV-positive fathers. For this, he received three years in prison and a hefty fine in 2019. The court ruled that he and two accomplices "willfully violated national biomedical research and medical ethics rules and recklessly applied gene editing technology in human reproductive medicine," Science writes. Nevertheless, in 2024, Jiankui said in an interview with Japanese newspaper The Mainichi that he was returning to work and that all three "designer" children were "perfectly healthy and had no growth problems."

It seems the idea is too tempting to continue to ignore. In late October 2025, scientist Lucas Harrington(a student of Jennifer Doudna,by the way) announced the creation of Preventive, a startup aimed at determining "whether the latest generation of gene editing technologies can be safely and responsibly used to correct devastating genetic diseases in future children." Harrington is its CEO.

The Wall Street Journal has learned that the startup was secretly founded in May 2025 and has already received at least $30 million in investment from Sam Altman and Brian Armstrong, among others.

Harrington categorically denied to the WSJ that his company had already found or worked with a couple willing to "edit" embryos to avoid developing a genetic disease. And he attributed Preventive's exploration of working outside the U.S., such as in the UAE, to regulatory constraints rather than a "desire to avoid oversight."

According to WSJ, at least two other US startups - Manhattan Genomics and Bootstrap Bio - intend to engage in genetic editing of human embryos.

Incidentally, according to NPR, Manhattan Genomics founder Cathy Tim, nicknamed "Biotech Barbie," was married to He Jiankui for a time, but her new project has nothing to do with him. From 2015 to 2017, she was a fellow at billionaire Peter Thiel's foundation, which gives up to $200,000 to talented young people to drop out of school and launch their own startup.

The CRISPR/Cas method is already being used to treat inherited diseases. In late 2023, the U.S. regulator FDA approved the first such therapy from Vertex Pharmaceuticals to treat sickle cell anemia, a dangerous blood disease.

The main problem in its development is a mutation that distorts the structure of hemoglobin, a protein found in red blood cells that delivers oxygen to the body's tissues. This mutation causes the red blood cells to take on a crescent or "sickle" shape. Sickle-shaped red blood cells restrict blood flow in blood vessels and interfere with oxygen delivery to body tissues, resulting in severe pain and organ damage. The result can be disability or early death.

For the treatment, bone marrow cells are taken from the patient, their DNA is modified using CRISPR/Cas to produce normal hemoglobin, and they are injected back into the body after first destroying the old cells with chemotherapy. The procedure is complex and expensive - over $2 million per patient.

Harrington believes that editing the DNA of an embryo can cost as little as $2-5 thousand. In addition, unlike the change of cells in the adult body, genetic editing of the embryo will also change its germ line, from which then develop human sex cells - sperm or eggs. Consequently, the DNA changes made to the embryo can be inherited.

Beautiful? Not really. If something goes wrong during DNA editing, not only the "designer" child, but also his or her descendants will get new mutations that may be worse than the ones tried to cure.

"Responsible adults agree that we can't do this now because it's unnecessarily unsafe. The risk-to-benefit ratio at this point is abysmal," the WSJ quoted Stanford University bioethicist Hank Greeley as saying.

The consequences of a technology's failure could be dire, but what would be the consequences of its success?

Many people have concerns about this too. Will the genetically enhanced children turn into a new race of rulers who will lord it over ordinary, unimproved people? Such a scenario was explored by director Andrew Niccol in the 1997 movie Gattaca, starring Ethan Hawke and Jude Law. He is often brought up when it comes to DNA editing and "designer" babies, Slate notes.

And for good reason: in April of this year, Armstrong explicitly wrote that the IVF clinic of the future "will utilize Gattaca's technology stack."

However, if you take a closer look at the movie, it says the exact opposite: DNA is not destiny. Ethan Hawke's "genetically imperfect" character overcomes all obstacles and achieves his dream.

Human beings are more complex than the sum of their genes. And this gives us hope that we will not fall into dependence on techno-billionaires who are used to rewriting code faster than they understand the consequences of their actions.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor