The creator of the CRISPR babies has been released from a Chinese prison

He and his team from the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen altered the girls' genes to make them resistant to HIV.

It's not clear if he will return to scientific research in China or another country. The biophysicist, who was trained at Rice University, has been described as idealistic by people who know him.

He thought he had created a new way to control the HIV epidemic that would be considered for a prize.

The existence of the baby project was discovered by MIT Technology Review on the eve of an international genome-editing summit in Hong Kong. He immediately posted several videos on the internet about the birth of the twins, who he named "Lula and Nana".

The experiment was denounced around the world and inside China. The use of genome editing could have introduced errors into the girls' genomes, according to scientists.

The description of the experiments was never published. The MIT Technology Review obtained draft copies of his paper, which one expert said was rife with ethical and scientific errors.

The researcher spent three years in China's prison system before his conviction. He has been in contact with members of his scientific network since his release.

Many other scientists knew of the project and encouraged it, despite the fact that responsibility for the experiment fell on He and other Chinese team members. Michael Deem, a former professor at Rice University who participated in the experiment, and John Zhang, the head of a large IVF clinic in New York had plans to sell the technology.

Deem left Rice in 2020 but the university has never released any findings about its involvement in the creation of the babies. Deem has an energy consulting company on his LinkedIn profile.

The author of The Mutant Project says that it is unusual that He Jiankui and some of his colleagues were imprisoned for this experiment.

Kirksey says justice has not been served.

He paid a high price. He was fired from his university job, separated from his wife and young children, and spent time in a prison far from his hometown.

He's punishment appears to have delayed further experiments on gene editing to make babies in China. The procedure is banned in the US because the FDA can't approve it.

There is a question of justice for the three children born as a result of the experiment, whose identities are not public. The fathers of all the children had HIV, so their parents agreed to join the experiment.

According to a news report in Nature, two 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 vulnerable and called for genetic analyses to determine whether their bodies contain genetic errors.

Kirksey says the study participants have not been treated fairly. They were promised health insurance plans for their children, but he says that amid the controversy, “the insurance plans were not issued and medical bills went unpaid.”