The Manhattan Project was the name given to the top-secret programme to develop the first ever nuclear weapons during the Second World War. It’s also the nickname Cathy Tie uses for her biotech start-up, Manhattan Genomics, which is working towards creating gene-edited babies. A jarring choice, perhaps, but Tie believes the technology is just as, if not more important. “Also, I just love Manhattan,” she says. Tie clearly understands the power of a catchy label — she is often referred to in the press as “Biotech Barbie”, a name she came up with herself.
The Manhattan Project 2.0 makes a bold claim: “We’re building a future where no child inherits preventable disease.” It promises to prevent “thousands of diseases”, including sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease. All three are common monogenic diseases, meaning they are caused by a mutation in a single gene and can be passed down from parent to child.
Biotech start-ups such as Manhattan Genomics have a proposition: to edit that single gene in a human embryo, thus eliminating the disease for that person and any future offspring.
Tech bros in Silicon Valley are paying attention. OpenAI founder Sam Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin are among the early investors in Preventive, another start-up which wants to establish whether the latest gene-editing technology can safely be used to “correct devastating genetic conditions for future children”. Preventive was founded by Lucas Harrington, who gained his PhD in the lab of biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her pioneering discovery of the gene-editing tool Crispr.
Silicon Valley is all ears…
Crispr-Cas9 is the only gene-editing therapy currently on the market. It works by making precise cuts to the affected DNA strand, causing the DNA to repair itself and, if all goes to plan, correct the mutation. In 2023, it was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat patients with sickle cell disease. However, treatment is priced at $2.2m per patient, and the disease can still be passed on to offspring.
“It’s absurd that a technology that’s supposed to be helping patients is actually bankrupting them,” says Tie in a promotional video on YouTube. Tie believes that prevention is the best treatment, and that gene-editing embryos “has the potential to revolutionise medicine”. Crispr comes with risks: it can cause unintended genome edits, which could have drastic implications for an embryo. Tie and others are currently looking into whether a more precise tool called base-editing would be viable.
Sam Altman
Getty Images
Editing genomes in embryos with the intention of creating a baby is currently illegal in the US, the UK and many other countries. Both Tie and Harrington are keen to stress that their companies are in the research phase, and they will only proceed if it is safe to do so. “We will not compromise safety standards to accelerate timelines,” writes Harrington in a statement on Preventive’s website.
Yet many in the scientific community feel that there is currently no appropriate timeline for such experimentation. “I don’t think that the technology is there to do this safely,” says geneticist Adam Rutherford, who has written a book on the history of eugenics. “We do not know enough about human genomics to be mucking around with this sort of stuff at this point in time.” Rutherford and many other geneticists believe that the risks of introducing an unknown mutation into a child are currently far too high to be outweighed by the potential benefits.
While Tie and Harrington insist that their start-ups are exclusively focused on correcting monogenic diseases, there is a clear appetite in Silicon Valley for designer babies. Altman and his husband welcomed their first child, born via surrogacy, earlier this year. According to The Wall Street Journal, Altman used polygenic screening to evaluate potential embryos. As well as screening for diseases, polygenic screening generates probabilities for a wide array of traits, including height and intelligence. The practice is currently illegal in the UK. Elon Musk reportedly did the same for two of the children he had with Shivon Zilis via IVF.
Elon Musk reportedly used polygenic screening for two of his children with Shivon Ellis
Shivon Zilis/X
Another of Preventive’s investors is crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong. In April, Armstrong tweeted his vision for “the IVF clinic of the future”. This would include genetic testing of embryos, as well as “further edits” for disease prevention as well as “enhancement”. He also envisions babies growing in “artificial wombs” to eliminate the risks of pregnancy.
Tricked into making babies
There are only three known gene-edited babies to have been born. In November 2018, Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he and colleagues at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen had used Crispr to modify a gene in embryos which they hoped to make resistant to HIV. They forged documents to recruit couples for the experiment and tricked doctors into implanting the embryos into two mothers. It is not known whether the experiment worked.
He’s actions were roundly condemned by the scientific community and he was sacked by the university, fined 3 million yuan (£320,000) and sentenced to three years in prison. This prompted leading scientists and bioethicists across the world to call for a global moratorium on editing the DNA in sperm, eggs or embryos to make genetically modified children.
In a bizarre twist, Tie met He Jiankui in China following his release from prison and the pair married earlier this year. According to Tie, the relationship has since ended, and He has nothing to do with Manhattan Genomics.
Preventive have reportedly found a couple with a genetic disease who are interested in taking part in preliminary tests. They would then need to find a country where it is legal. If they are successful, they believe that gene-editing could be “one of the most important health technologies of the century”. But it will be years before the implications of playing God become clear.
