Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.
Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.
Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.