Fertility Inc.: The Embryo Editing Dinner

0:00Hey, it's Jess.

0:01Ryan Knutson:And Ryan. Tickets for our live show in Los Angeles are on sale now. Join us Tuesday, April 28th at the El Rey Theater at 8 p.m. There'll be special guests, conversations about the business of Hollywood, and afterwards, we'll stick around to meet you all. Find a link in our show notes to get your tickets before they sell out, which they did very quickly last time. See you there.

0:27See you there. Let's travel back to the summer. It's late July. We're in the Bay Area in San Francisco at this ultra-luxury restaurant called Quince.

0:43Ryan Knutson:Our colleague Emily Glazer is describing a dinner she learned about a while ago. She talked to some of the people who were there. There was a whole group of Silicon Valley elite and scientists that were in a private room at the back of this restaurant, which had vintage Finnish furniture. At the center of the group was the evening's host. Brian Armstrong is there, wearing all black, kind of holding court. Brian Armstrong is the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, the U.S.'s biggest crypto company. And the evening kicked off with a central question for the attendees. How might they bring the powerful and highly debated medical technology known as embryo editing to fruition?

1:40Ryan Knutson:Embryo editing. Going into an embryo and tweaking its DNA. In other words, genetically engineering a baby. This was the idea that was on the table that night, along with the farm-to-table cuisine. It was basically called the embryo editing dinner. It was called the embryo editing dinner? Yes. Well, a calendar invite that I reviewed that went out to attendees described as embryo editing dinner. We asked Brian Armstrong for an interview, but through a representative, he declined.

2:19Ryan Knutson:But the topic of the conversation, to be clear, was should we edit an embryo or can we edit an embryo? You know what? It was actually neither of those. It was, we are going to edit an embryo.

2:35Ryan Knutson:So one more big picture question before we dig into the details. What's at stake here? Life as we know it?

2:48Ryan Knutson:Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, March 27th.

3:04Ryan Knutson:Coming up, one final story from the fringes of the fertility industry. And this one is very fringe. Today, Silicon Valley's quest to genetically engineer a baby.

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4:58Ryan Knutson:When it comes to reproductive technology, we are on the threshold of a new frontier. Today's gene editing techniques allow scientists to cut, edit, and insert DNA with remarkable precision. It's now possible to rewrite a child's genetic code before they're even born. But while this has been technically possible for a while now, it's only known to have been done once by one scientist. A Chinese researcher has shaken the international science community. He claims to have created the world's first genetically edited babies. There is a Chinese scientist named He Zhenkui who in 2018 claimed to have done embryo editing.

5:47He shocked the world with this news that he had produced children, genetically altered as embryos, to be immune to HIV. The embryos were then implanted into the mother, and Lulu and Nana were born earlier this month. As you perhaps could imagine, there were a lot of people that were very upset about this for a wide variety of reasons.

6:11Ryan Knutson:Prominent scientists denounced her. I mean, I think it's very disturbing. It's inappropriate. It goes against all of the guidelines that were established. He Jinghui was sentenced to three years in prison by Chinese authorities. And today, many scientists and doctors remain convinced that embryo editing is not ready to unleash on the world. As recently as 2025, there was this whole coalition of scientists, biotech companies, patient advocates that called for a 10-year moratorium on trying to bring an edited embryo to term. unless there's a whole global regulatory framework and consensus on ethical and safety issues.

6:53Ryan Knutson:Why are people concerned about this technology? All right, there's a bunch of things at play here. Number one is what could pass on to future generations. When you edit an embryo, it changes that person's DNA. But tweaks made at the embryo stage can also be heritable, Meaning, scientists aren't just messing around with one person's genetic code, but potentially their kids, too. And their kids' kids. So if any of those edits goes wrong, the impact could be huge. This whole idea, they call it off-target genetic consequences.

7:31Ryan Knutson:But there's another concern. And it's less to do with the science of embryo editing, and more to do with what it could mean for society. Many boosters of embryo editing talk about it as a way to eliminate debilitating genetic diseases to prevent human suffering before it even begins But critics like the supporters of that moratorium worry that once the technology is out of the bag people won't stop at just curing diseases Even in this moratorium that they wrote they talked about how it could potentially be applied for personal enhancement They use the term designer babies. And they even say in this moratorium the possibility of eugenics, which they describe as the programmed enhancement of offspring for a privileged few, shaping or even bifurcating evolution.

8:25Ryan Knutson:Hmm, right. There could be some group of people that are enhanced and therefore smarter, better, stronger, faster. And then they could pass that on to their own offspring. and then suddenly you have like a new class of human.

8:44Ryan Knutson:Embryo editing, with the intention of bringing a baby to term, is illegal in many countries around the world, including the U.S. Today, the Food and Drug Administration can't even consider applications for clinical trials if they involve creating a pregnancy with an edited embryo. But that hasn't stopped powerful people in Silicon Valley from wanting to do just that, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. Brian Armstrong is one of the most outspoken people in the tech community on all this. Armstrong has told people that he thinks gene editing technology could produce children that are less prone to heart disease, that have lower cholesterol, that have stronger bones to prevent osteoporosis.

9:27Ryan Knutson:Armstrong has made it clear he's interested in edits that would prevent diseases. But he's also expressed interest in the exact thing those scientists were worried about, designing better humans. It's what some in Silicon Valley refer to as enhancements. That was a word that came up a bunch with my sources, enhancements. Yeah, we'll cure some diseases and we'll also get, you know, some taller, more handsome people with full heads of hair. Yes, and you know, they might talk about that more like muscle mass or, you know, stronger hearts. You know, he has made comparisons to the movie Gattaca, the sci-fi classic.

10:07Ryan Knutson:First of all, if you haven't seen Gattaca, highly recommend. The movie stars Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Jude Law. And it's set in a feature where embryos are carefully screened and selected to produce the best babies. I have taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions, premature baldness, myopia, alcoholism and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity, etc. We didn't want, I mean, diseases, yes, but... Armstrong seems to have taken some inspiration from the movie. In a tweet last April, Armstrong wrote about his vision for an IVF clinic of the future, powered by a combination of technologies that he described as, quote, the Gattaca stack.

10:52He has referenced that. It's out in the open. He's not necessarily trying to hide it.

10:57Ryan Knutson:Among the tools he envisioned in this Gattaca stack was embryo editing for, quote, disease prevention or enhancement.

11:09Ryan Knutson:People who were at that embryo editing dinner told Emily that enhancements were a topic of conversation. And there was also some thinking out loud about strategy, how to introduce embryo editing to the world. One plan that Brian Armstrong had floated was for a venture to work in secret and then reveal a healthy, genetically engineered baby before the scientific and medical establishment had a chance to object. And it was almost like this leap that was meant to shock the world into acceptance. A spokeswoman for Armstrong said that he did mention the idea of working in secret. but that he also said it was someone else's idea, and that he and others at the dinner agreed it was a bad one.

11:54Ryan Knutson:To Emily, it wasn't immediately clear how serious this dinner conversation had been. Was this all just talk or something more? And then she got a tip. I distinctly remember getting a phone call one day. I was sitting in the Wall Street Journal newsroom in New York, and one of my sources called me and said that there was a company. Like, there really was one. An actual embryo editing company. And not only that, but one of the biggest names in Silicon Valley was connected to it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. And that gets your attention. Yeah, I actually got up from my desk and I awkwardly power walked slash jog slash ran.

12:42to our investigations editor's office and, like, grabbed the deputy editor. And I was like, you guys will not believe what I heard. This thing is real.

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14:38Ryan Knutson:Emily and her colleagues wanted to know more about this mysterious embryo editing company, but they didn't have much to go on. Just that it had an office in the San Francisco WeWork, and that it had hired somebody from a prestigious lab. Emily didn't even have a name for the company. So one of her colleagues started digging through corporate filings. And she was able to find the likely company in filing, and the name was preventive. And we were just like, what is this? But also, jackpot. It initially had a website with just its name, a logo, and essentially like a coming soon announcement. Emily and her colleagues were able to confirm that both Sam Altman and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong were investors in Preventive.

15:29Ryan Knutson:Though they weren't able to find out how much they'd invested. And when it came to Preventive's plans... we learned a few things. One was that they had been searching for places to experiment to do their work since it's illegal in the U.S., and one of those places was the United Arab Emirates, the UAE. The second thing is that they had identified a couple that was interested in doing embryo editing to prevent a hereditary disease, and that that couple was interested in participating. — So, preventive sounds like they're doing real stuff. — That's what we understood to be happening. Like, this was not just some, you know, Delaware corporate filing and a company had been created.

16:19There were, as far as we knew, some discussions, like, really taking place about work being done, tied to embryo editing. It wasn't just some pie-in-the-sky idea.

16:31Ryan Knutson:Emily and her colleagues also heard from a couple scientists who said they'd been personally pitched on getting involved in embryo editing. We learned that Brian Armstrong and people around him had approached a lot of different scientists around embryo editing. And in some cases, it was like a joke among some of them that they couldn't find people willing to do this because there was so much concern about it.

16:56Ryan Knutson:Just before Emily and her colleagues were about to reach out to the company directly, it came out of stealth mode and made a big announcement. And what did they say? So they say, when they announced themselves, that their mission is to, quote, determine whether the newest generation of gene editing technologies can be used safely and responsibly to correct devastating genetic conditions for future children. If proven to be safe, we believe preventive gene editing could be one of the most important health technologies of the century. So in other words, they're saying, we want to use this technology to prevent diseases.

17:34And to do it really safely and responsibly.

17:37Ryan Knutson:How did the company respond when you and your colleagues put the question to them about what you had found, which is that they were talking to a couple, that they were looking at the UAE, and they were actually taking these active steps? So Lucas Harrington, preventive CEO, said it was completely false that the company had identified or was working with a couple on editing their embryos. He said the company's focused on research to prove the safety of embryo editing before attempting to actually bring a baby to term. Hmm. So the company says that we're still in the research phase. We're not actually, like, taking active steps toward doing it.

18:09He also did say that Preventive is compelled to work outside the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration prohibits reviewing applications for human trials that involve embryo editing.

18:23Ryan Knutson:After Emily reached out to Armstrong and his representatives for comment, he posted on X that he was excited to be an investor in preventive. More than 300 million people globally live with genetic disease, he wrote. It is far easier to correct a small number of cells before disease progression occurs. In a statement, Sam Altman's husband, Oliver Mulherin, said that he was the one driving the couple's investment in preventive because, quote, I care about research that helps people avoid disease. The Wall Street Journal has some extraordinary reporting out that a small company has spent months pursuing a secret project for a genetically engineered baby.

19:06Ryan Knutson:When Emily and her colleagues published their story, it resurfaced fears about safety and eugenics. Scientists and bioethicists reiterated their concerns that embryo editing is unsafe and accused Preventive of working on quote-unquote baby improvement. But that pushback hasn't slowed Preventive down. What we've actually seen more recently is that Preventive has hired more scientists. On LinkedIn, we saw someone else started there in January 2026, listed as a senior scientist. Another person started in December 2025. That company is growing since we reported on it.

19:51Ryan Knutson:It's far too early to tell whether Preventive or other future projects like it will succeed. But they may not need to. Because at the same time that tech titans like Brian Armstrong are investing in embryo editing, they're also investing in another technology, one that's arguably a lot easier to pull off, and one that could achieve a lot of the same aims. That technology is embryo screening. After screening, we are left, as you see, with two healthy boys and two very healthy girls. If you think back to Gattaca, the scientists in that movie weren't actually editing embryos. They were screening them, testing them for disease risks and other traits, and then using that information to decide which embryo to implant.