“The Creator of the CRISPR Babies Has Been Released from a Chinese Prison: He Jiankui Created the First Gene-Edited Children. The Price Was His Career. And His Freedom.”, 2022-04-04 (; similar):
The daring Chinese biophysicist [He Jiankui] who created the world’s first gene-edited children has been set free after 3 years in a Chinese prison…Following international condemnation of the experiment, He was placed under home arrest and then detained. In December 2019, he was convicted by a Chinese court, which said the researcher had “deliberately violated” medical regulations and had “rashly applied gene editing technology to human assisted reproductive medicine.”
His release from prison was confirmed by people familiar with the situation and He answered his mobile phone when contacted early today. “It’s not convenient to talk right now”, he said before hanging up…It’s unclear whether He has plans to return to scientific research in China or another country. People who know him have described the biophysicist, who was trained at Rice University and Stanford, as idealistic, naïve, and ambitious.
…He, who has a wife and children, paid a steep price. He was fired from his university job and spent time in a prison distant from his hometown in Shenzhen…“It is extraordinary and unusual that [He Jiankui] and some of his colleagues were imprisoned for this experiment”, says Eben Kirksey, an associate professor at the Alfred Deakin Institute, in Australia, and the author of The Mutant Project, a book about He’s experiment that includes interviews with some of the participants. “At the same time many of [his] international collaborators—like Michael Deem and John Zhang—were never sanctioned or formally censured for involvement. In many ways justice has not been served”, says Kirksey.
…In February, according to a news report in Nature, 2 senior Chinese bioethicists called on China’s government to create a research program to oversee the health of the CRISPR children. They classified the children as a “vulnerable group” and called for genetic analyses to determine whether their bodies contain genetic errors they could pass to future generations.