November 28, 2018

He Jiankui affair

He Jiankui presents his gene-edited-baby claims at the Hong Kong genome summit

He opened by apologizing that the birth had leaked — not for the experiment. During the questions he disclosed that another edited pregnancy was already underway.

The Hong Kong summit, 28 November 2018

At the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong on 28 November 2018, He Jiankui publicly presented his claim that his team had edited fertilized human eggs with CRISPR-Cas9, implanted embryos and produced twin girls.

He said the work targeted CCR5, a gene involved in HIV's entry into cells, with the intention of reducing the children's susceptibility to some HIV strains.

This was his formal conference presentation, not the first public disclosure: news, videos and press reporting had already appeared on 25–26 November.

The room pushed back that afternoon

During questioning, He disclosed that another pregnancy involving a genome-edited embryo was in progress.

Participants challenged the experiment's oversight, consent process, medical necessity, funding, transparency and possible health effects. Organizing-committee chair David Baltimore called it irresponsible and a failure of scientific self-regulation.

The organizers said they had invited He on the strength of earlier genome-editing work and had not known he had attempted an edited pregnancy; they gave him a separate presentation so the claims could be questioned in public.

Claims, not verified results

Nothing He presented had been independently verified or peer reviewed, and the summit proceedings preserve that distinction explicitly.

He had tried to reproduce the naturally protective CCR5-Δ32 deletion, but published analysis of his displayed data says neither twin received that 32-base-pair deletion; the procedure produced other variants with unknown consequences. CCR5 is used by some HIV strains and not others, so no protective effect was established.

The next day the summit committee demanded independent verification, and Chinese authorities ordered the research suspended and opened investigations. A later official investigation found eight couples recruited, of whom one withdrew and seven proceeded; a Shenzhen court subsequently confirmed that three children were born from the project.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The November 28 presentation is well documented, but He’s scientific claims had not been independently verified or peer reviewed at the time. The summit proceedings explicitly preserve that distinction.
The twins’ exact birth date and month remain private and were reported inconsistently. Contemporary accounts often said November or “weeks earlier,” while some later scholarly reconstructions place the birth in October.
Later official proceedings confirmed that three children were born, but the children’s medical records and complete genomic data have not been made public.