Creating and implanting synthetic monkey embryos could pave the way to stem-cell babies

Scientists created monkey embryo-like structures and implanted them, although no fetuses formed. (Shutterstock)

In January 2017, I met Jiankui He, the now-infamous Chinese scientist who would go on to create the world’s first genome-edited babies. This was at a meeting in Berkeley, Calif., hosted by Jennifer Doudna who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR genome-editing technology.