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"That rare kind of scholarship that is also a page-turner." At a conference in Hong Kong in November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui announced that he had created the first genetically modified babies -- twin girls named Lulu and Nana -- sending shockwaves around the world. A year later, a Chinese court sentenced Dr. He to three years in prison for "illegal medical practice."As scientists elsewhere start to catch up with China's vast genetic research program, gene editing is fueling an innovation economy that threatens to widen racial and economic inequality. Fundamental questions about science, health, and social justice are at stake: Who gets access to gene editing technologies? As countries loosen regulations around the globe, from the U.
About the Author
Eben Kirksey attended the University of Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Often on the road, he lives between Australia and the United States.Eben has an insatiable curiosity about nature and culture. Investigating some of the most important stories of our time - related to biotechnology, the environment, and social justice - led him to Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas.In academic settings, Eben is perhaps best known for his work on multispecies ethnography - a field that uses innovative approaches to study human interactions with animals, microbes, fungi, and plants. Hope is a central theme that runs through Eben's books. The Mutant Project explores how the fragile hopes of patients - people who dream of curing chronic illnesses with gene editing - have inspired scientists and biotechnology companies to do better research.When controversy broke about the world's first genetically modified babies, Eben spoke about ethics from the main stage of the International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. Over 1.8 million people watched news unfold from the Summit in real time, as Dr. Jiankui He revealed the details of his CRISPR experiment. After the dust settled, Eben traveled to mainland China where he secured insider access to Dr. He's laboratory. Profit-driven medical enterprises continue to push CRISPR into reproductive clinics.In an era of widespread environmental destruction and pandemic disease, it has become difficult to hold onto hope. While researching Emergent Ecologies, Eben found lively communities that are flourishing in unexpected places.Eben has found hope in difficult situations too. At the age of twenty-two he witnessed a massacre in West Papua, a remote Pacific island. His first book, Freedom in Entangled Worlds, explores dreams of Indigenous peoples who are trying to liberate themselves from a situation of genocide.
