On a Friday evening in late April, Cathy Tie, the Canadian serial entrepreneur and self-styled “Biotech Barbie”, is centre stage at New York City’s famous Carnegie Hall, performing Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No 2 on a gleaming Steinway grand piano, accompanied by an orchestra. Her floor-length pink tulle gown shimmers with gold sequins; her dark hair cascades in waves over her caped shoulders. The music is passionate, but Tie’s expression is impassive. Her eyes dart between the piano keys and the sheet music in a flurry of concentration, but the rest of her face is totally still. She isn’t lost in the music; she’s focused on the job.
After the last notes ring out, Tie stands up and breaks into a tight smile and a brief bow before walking off stage, only to immediately return to receive the slightly awkward Happy Birthday sung by everyone in the orchestra and auditorium. This is Tie’s 30th birthday party. She has hired Carnegie Hall to mark the occasion. And, as I discover at the cocktail afterparty, most of the people invited to this performance – including me – have either only just met Tie or don’t know her at all.
Tie likes to make an impact in whatever she does – but she’s a difficult person to pin down. Since the start of 2025, Tie has launched three separate biotech companies and lived in three different cities (Los Angeles, Toronto and New York). She tried to live in a fourth (Beijing), only to discover that she was banned from China – the country of her birth – while she was en route to begin a new life with her Chinese husband. This time a year ago, Tie had just married one of the most notorious scientists on the planet, the biophysicist He Jiankui, who served three years in prison after he illegally created the world’s first gene-edited babies.
Tie and He separated three months after their wedding. Last summer, Tie arrived in New York with little more than a suitcase and her shih-tzu, Charlie, to announce a new venture: a startup that will conduct the same kinds of procedures that had earned her ex the nickname “China’s Dr Frankenstein”. Tie wants to edit the genes of embryos – to alter the building blocks of human life – to prevent diseases including cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s and hereditary cancers. Unlike He, she says she wants her work to be done openly and transparently, with the blessing of regulators – and powered by the rocket fuel of venture capital investment.
The hardest thing about genetically engineering a baby is getting permission to do it; the technical part is not particularly complicated. Ever since the Crispr-Cas9 gene editing tool was invented in 2012, so long as you know the sequence of DNA in a genome that you would like to change, you can seek it out, then alter or delete it. It’s a bit like using the find, copy, cut and paste functions on a computer. You don’t even need to be a very experienced molecular biologist to do it.
If you edit the sequence of DNA of germline cells – the eggs, sperm and very early embryos that form the first stages of human reproduction – the changes you make will be reproduced in all the other cells of the human being ultimately created from those cells. And not just that particular human: every generation of their descendants will inherit those changes. Of all the possibilities presented in biotechnology, this is arguably the one with the highest stakes for humankind. That’s why the use of germline gene editing for reproductive purposes (rather than research) is banned in the UK, the US and China, and there is widespread international agreement that no research should be conducted on embryos that could grow to term and be born as babies.
“This is obviously the most consequential technology of our generation, because it fundamentally impacts and changes our understanding of what we can do with our species,” Tie says when we first meet, three days before Carnegie Hall.
Gene editing has the power to alter the trajectory of human evolution for ever; the direction it takes will depend on who wields the editing tools. “There is no public funding available for researchers in the space,” Tie explains. “Everything is privately funded.” It’s up to entrepreneurs to demonstrate the potential benefits for humankind, she says, so regulators may soften their hardline stance and allow them to rewrite human DNA.
For anything to change, there needs to be wider public acceptance of gene editing. With that in mind – and in the spirit of the openness she claims as her USP – Tie has invited me to join her in the run-up to her party as she takes on what she calls the “fear dressed up as caution” about her field. Her goal, she says, is to save humanity from the cruel tyranny of heritable diseases. But, as her birthday celebration demonstrates, Tie doesn’t do things by halves. If she succeeds, what next?
* * *
Money is flowing into human genetic engineering. Since Tie arrived in New York last August, some of the richest men in the world have begun investing in her rivals. Gene editing startup Preventive launched in October with the stated aim of “preventing disease before birth”, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, along with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, are among its investors.
Seven months before Preventive’s launch, Armstrong coined the term “the Gattaca stack” – after the dystopian 1997 sci-fi film about a near-future society dominated by genetically engineered super-beings – in a post on X describing technologies he says will be routinely used to create the babies of the future. Gene editing “for disease prevention, or enhancement” was included in Armstrong’s list. For him, at least, this is about improving babies, as well as avoiding disease.
Another item in Armstrong’s Gattaca stack – preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), so you can “choose the embryo that best matches what you want” – is already routinely used in the US. It’s unremarkable enough that the PGT company Nucelus Genomics advertises on the New York subway with the tagline “Have your best baby”, promising to maximise parents’ chances of having a child that is taller and smarter as well as healthier. PGT is embryo selection – sorting and choosing, rather than editing – but over the past decade it has become a regular part of fertility treatment for many Americans. Eugenics might still be a dirty word in most circles but, in the US at least, it has become quietly acceptable to use whatever tools reproductive technology can provide to optimise future offspring.
Tie isn’t fazed by her competition. “I hope there is more funding from billionaires,” she says, simply. She doesn’t regard them as competitors anyway, as there is currently no market in which they can legally compete. “I believe we’re all working on the same goal, which is to show, transparently, what this research can do.”
China, of course, has already demonstrated what gene editing can do. It was Chinese researchers who made the very first edits to human embryos in 2015, and a Chinese scientist – Tie’s former husband, He Jiankui – who implanted gene-edited embryos for the first time, creating twin girls known as Lulu and Nana, the first genetically modified human beings ever born.
He announced Lulu and Nana’s birth in a presentation at a Hong Kong conference in 2018. He had edited their embryos with the intention of giving them immunity to HIV; the twins’ father was HIV positive, and He was trying to introduce a gene mutation that would protect them from infection. But, according to his own data, he failed to do this; edits were made to the twins’ genetic code, but not the ones he had intended, yet he still allowed the embryos to be implanted and brought to term. The furore after their birth earned He a 3m yuan fine (about £330,000), as well as three years in jail. As for Lulu and Nana, no one knows what happened to them: there is no available information on their health or wellbeing eight years on from He’s experiment.
Since he was released from jail in 2022, China’s Dr Frankenstein has emerged as an unlikely social media star, with close to 150,000 followers on X. His posts over the past year have been unrepentant, but also – intriguingly – uncensored by the Chinese government. “Silicon Valley this and that – you are not the only country in the world that has investors,” he wrote in August, followed by, “Designer babies, super smart or super good-looking, are inevitable.” At the same time, China’s biotechnology ambitions have rapidly expanded. On 12 September, premier Li Qiang announced new draft regulations on biomedical technologies that emphasised “the need to promote innovative development” and “accelerate R&D and commercialization”.
“Welcome to the dawn of the biological arms race,” Tie posted on X in response to Li’s announcement. “There’s a big geopolitical component to this,” she says. This is one of the reasons why she chose to call her first human gene-editing company the Manhattan Project – the same name as the programme that produced the atomic bomb in 1945. It was also known as Manhattan Genomics, but “I like to call it Manhattan Project”, Tie says. (She earned the nickname Biotech Barbie after she commissioned a promotional video of herself in the style of the Barbie movie. “Both Oppenheimer and the Barbie movie came out at the same time in 2023,” she explains. “It was Barbenheimer summer.”)
“Two nuclei are essential for understanding the universe: the nucleus of the atom and the nucleus of the cell,” Tie says. “In the 20th century, we understood the nucleus of the atom very well, and we learned some very difficult lessons via weapons and wars. I don’t want to see the same happen with the second nucleus.” It’s a strange parallel to draw: the atomic bomb was responsible for at least 200,000 deaths, and many wish the research into the possibilities contained in the nucleus of the atom had never been undertaken.
“Biology is a double-edged sword – it can be used for good, to heal people, or it can be used for bad,” Tie continues. “Stopping this research will only drive bad actors to do it secretively. There is no way to stop this. This is inevitable. The only way to proceed is to do it openly and transparently.”
* * *
Despite her declared commitment to openness, much of Tie’s work seems as shrouded in secrecy as the original Manhattan Project. She won’t tell me how many people are working on her team or who they are (“I’m working with pioneers. I’m unable to name them, unfortunately”) or who has invested in her company (“I’m unable to disclose their names, but these are very motivated individuals and funds”). She doesn’t want me to reveal where her work is based, other than that it’s in New York (it’s not in Manhattan).
It is also no longer the Manhattan Project. By December, the gene-editing startup Tie launched last August had shut down. “I made a fundamental mistake that a lot of early-stage startup founders do, which is choosing the wrong co-founder,” she tells me. Eriona Hysolli was the former head of biological sciences at Colossal, a company that uses biotechnology to try to de-extinct the woolly mammoth. Hysolli has said she and Tie parted ways because of “a Cayman-based entity” founded by Tie “which confounded the open and transparent mission”. When I ask Tie to tell me more, her reply is terse: “I don’t want to talk too much about that.”
But Tie is more than happy to speak at length about the mission of Origin Genomics, her current gene-editing startup. Its aim, she says, is to eliminate severe disorders caused by single gene mutations. “It’s about preventative pre-birth care for the patients that are carriers of these well-known mutations. The goal of Origin Genomics is to help prevent suffering via the newest gene editors applied before birth.”
Older gene editors – including the versions of Crispr-Cas9 used by He when he created Lulu and Nana, although Tie doesn’t mention this specifically – were more prone to “off-target” effects, resulting in the wrong edits. “There are new advances in gene editing that make this process a lot safer than it was even five, eight, 10 years ago,” Tie continues. “We sequence the cells before and after the genetic change to ensure that it is safe, and that no unintended genetic changes were made.” In accordance with US federal law, none of the embryos Tie’s company is working with at this stage are implanted, or allowed to grow older than 14 days’ gestation.
“This is to prove to the world – the public, the scientific community, the regulators, the bioethicists – that this technology can be safe, if the data shows that it is, and that it should be considered for clinical use,” she says. “I would love to change the global norms of this. I think it’s inevitable, and someone needs to do it right.” (During our conversation in her office, Tie uses the word “inevitable” 12 times.)
But there are other ways of treating the same conditions that don’t result in genetic changes that will be passed on to every future generation. Gene therapies work on cells that aren’t involved in reproduction. They are given to carriers of a genetic disease after the patient has been born, and they affect only some, not all, of the body’s cells. Once researchers devise a way of delivering the gene therapy to the right cells, they can correct the relevant genetic mutations. Gene therapy is already being used to target a wide range of conditions, including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anaemia and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), once the most common genetic cause of death among children under two years old.
Tie is unconvinced. “Many of those therapies have failed in clinical trials,” she says. “It is actually safest to explore this when a human is in its earliest stages of development, because you have fewer cells to deliver the genetic changes to.” Gene therapies can be extremely expensive – Zolgensma, the gene therapy for SMA, had a list price of £1.79m when it was approved on the NHS in 2021; the treatment for sickle cell, Casgevy, has a similar price. “Casgevy is a three-to-six-month process. Patients have to go through chemotherapy and other really invasive procedures,” Tie says. This isn’t the case for all gene therapies, I point out; Zolgesma is given in a single dose, delivered over a few hours. Tie blinks. “I’m not too familiar with that example. The research I’ve done shows gene therapy is quite invasive. And it’s all relative. When you have an embryo that grows up without the mutation, that’s a lot more ideal.”
Why not screen embryos and implant those that don’t carry these disorders, instead of editing those that do? Families often don’t have the choice, Tie replies; sometimes all their embryos are affected. And, as we move further into an age when women are having children later in life, they are often less able to produce enough eggs to create a meaningful range of embryos to choose from. “That’s why patients believe their embryos are very precious. And so do the IVF doctors,” she says. “Not to mention that it’s extremely taxing on the woman’s body to go through multiple rounds of IVF to achieve that idealistic philosophical vision of only using embryo selection, and no germline gene correction. I think both options should be available to families.”
Editing embryos is morally more defensible than choosing between them, Tie argues. “We shouldn’t throw away an embryo because of something small we can fix – we fix it. Just like if someone has a disease, we treat it instead of throwing the whole person away.”
I ask Tie how much gene editing will cost. “I don’t have a number because this will be determined by each country,” she replies. “Every country has a different healthcare system.” Tie is Canadian, so she and I are used to a very different healthcare system to the US. Does she feel uncomfortable that, in the country where her company is based, only the wealthy will be able to afford the incredibly powerful technology she is creating?
She pauses. “A lot of technologies are only available at a very high cost when they are first developed,” she says eventually. “Just because something is initially expensive, it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist at all.” But this isn’t a new electric car or a piece of lab-grown meat. It will give the first people to use it a generational head start on everyone else. “I think this is where it’s very important to have the public be engaged with this conversation and why I participate in these interviews,” Tie says. Once again, her commitment to transparency feels like a smokescreen.
It would be easy to take Tie at her word that she only wants to use gene editing to alleviate human suffering. But a little over a year ago she was using this technology to biohack pets – trying to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and even dragons that would be sold on to consumers – with her first ever gene editing startup, the Los Angeles Project. “I’m personally really interested in the unicorn,” Tie said at the time.
When I bring this up, Tie suppresses a snigger. “Initially, the idea was to use animal embryology to understand human embryology better, which has always been my mission. That was one of the ways in which I tried to explore this field in a compliant way.” She’s no longer working with the team, but wishes them all the best. “I truly hope they are successful.”
I can see why designer pets would be a good place to start, I say – there are far fewer restrictions on experimenting on animals compared with human embryos. “I’m not familiar with the animal consent process because I don’t work with that company right now,” Tie replies. What was she doing when she was working with them? “I would prefer to stay away from that topic. I don’t recall too many details at the moment.”
* * *
Tie’s family moved to Canada from a small town near Beijing when she was four, and she grew up in Mississauga, near Toronto. Her parents “worked any job they could find” before starting their own business (she won’t tell me in which sector). “It showed me that if you work hard and rely on your own ideas and your own drive, then you could create a different reality for yourself.” As a young teenager, Tie emailed 100 professors asking for work experience in their labs. She managed to secure a placement with a professor at the University of Toronto’s department of immunology, famously writing her first scientific paper at the age of 16, in Canadian Young Scientist Journal, a publication dedicated to publishing student-driven research.
By this time, she’d already learned that scientific success can translate into money. “I used to participate in science fairs in middle school and high school where I earned thousands of dollars in college scholarships every year, and also some cash prizes. I liked that a lot.” She smiles. “I remember my biology teacher giving me a hard time for not showing up to class a couple of times because I had to compete in these science fairs and win them. Then I was, like, ‘You’re my biology teacher. Can you show me your latest published paper? I’d love to learn more about your work.’ And she didn’t have any published papers. But I’m, like, ‘I’ve published a paper.’ I like to question systems a lot.”
When Tie was 18, she won a Thiel Fellowship – a then $100,000 grant funded by the billionaire Peter Thiel awarded to people aged 22 or younger who are willing to drop out of university to “build new things” – and left the University of Toronto. “It made so much sense to me to impact more people through the markets rather than wait another 10 years to get my PhD and postdoc,” she says. “It empowered me to pursue things way more aggressively than I would have otherwise.”
Tie moved to San Francisco and in 2015 founded the genetic testing company Ranomics. She was named as one of Forbes magazine’s 30 notable people under 30 in 2018, when she was 21. Her second company was Locke Bio, a digital health platform that allowed pharmaceutical companies to sell direct to consumers. After 10 years in California, Tie had planned to moved to Austin, Texas, and focus on the Los Angeles Project. But then she fell in love with He Jiankui.
Of all the things that Tie does not want to talk about, her relationship with He is top of the list. They met through a friend in Shanghai in 2023. She interviewed him for her YouTube channel in January 2024, asking highly scripted softball questions and telling him he is “very inspiring”. Tie travelled to Beijing in January 2025 and they began a relationship. On 18 April that year, He announced on X that they had got married. Their wedding bands were custom-made DNA double helixes.
“Those trained in the scientific system are too brainwashed and financially paralyzed to act with agency and think for themselves,” Tie posted on 18 May 2025, underneath their wedding photographs. “When I met He Jiankui, I realized he was different. He was clearly a heretic. When I spoke to him in 2023 after he had served his prison sentence, he said he wanted to double down on germline gene editing. Despite being cancelled countless times, he stood his ground.” She revealed his new company, Cathy Medicine, was named after her.
But she was stranded in Manila, her post continued, and she had no idea why the Chinese authorities had banned her from entering the country to be with her new husband; the government was also preventing him from leaving it. (To this day, Tie doesn’t know why she was banned. Perhaps the Chinese government wanted to keep her and He apart; perhaps they didn’t want a second biotech entrepreneur with a high-profile social media presence in the country.)
In a series of now-deleted tweets, Tie called for help from “crypto people”. A meme coin was launched to raise money for He’s new research lab, and He used his and Tie’s faces to promote it. “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie and continue my gene editing research,” He posted to his X followers, adding the hashtag $GENE.
“I just want to clarify: I was not legally married,” Tie tells me, her face reddening. Did they split up only because they couldn’t be in the same country? Tie nods. “Yeah. Mmm-hmm.” Her shoulders are hunched. She is squirming. “Do you mind if I use the restroom?” she asks. “I really have to use the restroom. I’ll be right back.”
She returns five minutes later, composed once again. As much as she seems to genuinely hate being asked about He, she realises their relationship is an unavoidable part of both her personal and professional story. “There’s not much I can do about it, but I still believe the work I’m doing will stand on its own,” she says. What did she find interesting about him? She shrugs. “He did a science experiment and went to jail.”
In a video she made to launch the Manhattan Project in August 2025, Tie talks about He’s “experiment” and says, “The biggest problem, in my opinion, was that it was done in secrecy.” Does she still stand by that? “Yup.”
He was editing the genes of healthy embryos that did not carry a heritable condition, I say. He made the edits in an effort to prevent the twins from perhaps contracting a disease they might be exposed to because there was an HIV positive person in their family. She pauses. “I said the biggest problem was the secrecy. But, yeah, it should have started with disease-causing mutations.”
But the edits didn’t work. He created unintended, unknown changes to the genomes of the two embryos, yet chose to implant them anyway. “I am not familiar enough with the exact sequences of post-gene editing and how it may or may not lead to HIV protection,” Tie replies, contradicting a post she made a few days before our conversation, naming the specific gene He had been targeting and inaccurately stating how his work “helped make the twin girls immune to HIV”.
“The biggest problem, in my opinion, which I still stand by,” Tie repeats, “was the lack of global transparency.”
Surely the biggest problem is that there are now at least two human beings somewhere in the world who were created as experiments, and we have no idea what their health outcomes will be, or what the future holds for them. Surely that matters a lot more than any reputational damage caused to the field of genetic engineering through He’s lack of transparency?
“That is certainly very serious,” Tie says, enunciating every word. But she has nothing more to say about it.
* * *
It may be possible to make a convincing argument that serious heritable diseases linked to a single gene should be edited out of human embryos. But once the world has agreed on using genetic engineering to combat disease, where do we draw a line? Should we be happy to create babies who will have lower cholesterol and are less likely to have heart disease, or stronger bones to combat osteoporosis? Will being less smart or not as tall one day be viewed as a correctable condition?
“Part of Origin Genomics’ statement on ethics is to focus only on diseases. The idea is to focus on diseases that are well characterised, that are severe and cause suffering,” Tie says.
But when I ask whether she will always be opposed to gene editing for enhancement, she pauses. “Right now, the technology is not ready for that. It can only make very precise corrections and variant changes. Enhancements are complex: IQ, height – thousands of genes contribute to that, we’re nowhere close to being able to, one, understand it, and two, correct it.”
If and when it does become possible, would she want to do it?
“As of right now, I have a very strong gut reaction that I don’t want to go into that. But society is complex, and at every point in my career I want to engage with all stakeholders to make informed decisions on what’s best.”
Barely a year ago, Tie had no qualms about making enhancements – to animals. She was trying to turn horses into unicorns, in the belief that there would be a market where the wealthy would pay for genetically engineered pets. The growing number of parents willing to pay to have the genomes of their frozen embryos tested and ranked so only the tallest, most intelligent or otherwise most optimal will be given a chance at life shows there will be a market for enhanced babies, too.
Tie thinks this shouldn’t be her concern. “This is where regulators need to step in and regulate on the correct and safe use cases of this technology. At some point, my job ends at giving the data to the people who are democratically elected to protect society.”
For now, Tie is focused on severe disease – but she says the definition of “severe” should be left up to patient advocacy groups. “I think it’s immoral to have bioethicists and regulators that don’t have these diseases say, ‘This is not bad enough.’ While those families that have those diseases are suffering, and they know that they have to pass it down to their children, it’s very devastating for them.”
As long as reproduction is a genetic lottery, there will be parents who can argue that they don’t have the right numbers. Once it becomes possible to edit the numbers, those parents will be able to make a case that anything suboptimal is serious enough to be changed. When it comes to mission creep, the stakes of what Tie is doing are dizzyingly high.
Tie is weary of arguments such as this. “In the late 70s, IVF was invented, and there were the exact same comments from reporters. People called them ‘test tube babies’, ‘Frankenstein’s monsters’. People said it was very consequential. So this is not new.” At the same time, she says she understands why some people are deeply troubled by genetic engineering. “I have the same concerns,” she says, her hand over her heart. “I would not want to use this tomorrow, but I believe the only way to move forward is not to delay the research further.”
This sounds like the “move fast and break things” mentality of Silicon Valley we now realise is responsible for a level of damage we’re only just beginning to comprehend. But when I put this to Tie, it makes her visibly irritated. “I don’t know anyone who’s applying that mentality in the space. No one is trying to move fast and break things here. Everyone’s moving at a pace that is appropriate by scientific standards.”
Until she founded her gene-editing startups, Tie had never really faced much public scrutiny or criticism. This is an unfamiliar experience. “All my life, I’ve been painted as a young, bright entrepreneur pushing the field of science and healthcare forward,” she tells me.
But she was actually expecting more of a backlash, she adds. The fact it hasn’t materialised has emboldened her. “I think this is a sign people are changing their opinions.”
* * *
The night before Tie takes to the stage at Carnegie Hall, she is on another stage, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in a livestreamed public debate with the Harvard lawyer and bioethicist Prof I Glenn Cohen, organised by the Hastings Center for Bioethics. Tie spots me in the audience and waves down at me. She looks immaculate, in a leather skirt and black cape, with a circular handbag featuring an ornate, gilded clock face. The bag is eye-catching and dramatic, but it’s too small to contain her iPad, which pokes out of the top.
“We talk often about the danger of moving too fast. I want to name the danger of moving too slow, and the fantasy of waiting for global consensus, which will not arrive,” Tie says in her opening remarks.
“It’s complex, in that it imposes possible benefits and risks, and we’re talking about future generations who have not consented to either of those things,” Cohen says. “It touches on very sensitive questions, like the values of communities, questions of eugenics.”
“Eugenics is a very heavy word,” Tie says just before taking questions from the floor. “I would prefer to stop throwing that word around.”
By the end of the debate, there seems to be a clear agreement that gene editing for some diseases should be allowed. Even Cohen agrees, in cases where no other option – gene therapy or embryo selection – is possible.
And suddenly, it does feel inevitable to me that this is going to happen. It has already happened. Whether Tie will be the person to get regulations changed to allow it to happen legally is another matter. But there are enough people prepared to put money, time and effort into this technology – and enough demand for it – that it feels like a question of when, not if.
Tie steps down from the stage. “The tide is turning!” she tells me, with a broad, triumphant grin.
On these hallowed New York stages, in this company, Tie is a bold performer, determined to build her reputation as a respectable voice for her field. Whether she can shake the spectre of her previous collaborations – with the Manhattan Project, with the Los Angeles Project, with He Jiankui – remains to be seen. Perhaps it won’t matter, if she succeeds.
“I’m not perfect. I do make mistakes sometimes, but I learn very quickly and I’m not afraid to continue taking risks when I make these mistakes,” Tie says. But she won’t comment on the mistakes she has made over the past year of her life, so I don’t know what she has learned from them, other than to try again, and try harder. And this is a field where there cannot be mistakes.
