About

Jiankui He is a controversial Chinese biophysicist and geneticist known for creating the first human genetically edited babies in 2018, an experiment that was initially applauded in the press, with He being listed in Time's 100 most influential people of 2019. Following scrutiny, the experiment was established to have had violated established scientific community norms. He was fired from his university and was later sentenced to three years of prison.

In 2022, Jiankui He became active on social media, often advocating gene editing and scientific advancement in his posts. In 2025, He's posts on X inspired memes, with users humorously captioning his photographs and posts. Notable tweets from him read, "Tinkering with human embryos will certainly be worth the risk," and, "Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress."

History

Jiankui He (born 1984) is a Chinese biophysicist who is best known for his research in gene editing in humans. He achieved notoriety for his controversial 2018 gene-editing experiment which involved editing genes in human sperm during in virto fertilization. Particularly, during the experiment a natural mutation granting resistance to a specific variant of HIV infection was introduced to sperm of several HIV-infected males. Following the experiment, twin girls known by pseudonyms Lulu and Nana were born in October 2018.^[1][2] On November 25th, 2018, He Jiankui publicly reported the results of his experiment in a YouTube^[3] video that garnered over 747,000 views in seven years (shown below).

The experiment was deemed controversial by the scientific community due to He's disregard for scientific standards and potential endangerment of the lives of the babies. In 2019, a Chinese district court found He Jiankui guilty of illegal practice of medicine, sentencing him to thee years in prison.

Online History

In 2022, following his release from prison, Jiankui He launched his X^[4] / Twitter account @Jiankui_He, where he has been advocating gene editing. On the account, Jiankui has typically posted photographs of himself in a laboratory coat together with a certain musing, often an opinion on legal, societal, and moral aspects of gene editing (example shown below).

In Memes

On March 6th, 2025, Jiankui He posted a photograph of himself with the caption "Human will no longer be controlled by Darwin's evolution". The post went viral on X^[5] / Twitter, garnering over 3,800 reposts and 64,000 likes in five days, as users made humorous quote posts in which they imagined fictional characters whom the quote could fit. For example, X^[6] user @ChuppaVGC posted a Pokemon joke based on the post that received over 22,000 reposts and 246,000 likes in five days (shown below).

In the following week, multiple other posts shared by Jiankui He were used in a similar manner. For example, on March 11th, 2025, X^[7] user @LookAtMyMeat1 made a quote post based on He's tweet that received over 490 reposts and 5,500 likes in one day (shown below).

Additionally, users combined photographs of He together with their own captions, parodying his style of posting, and shared other memes featuring the scientist. For example, on March 11th, 2025, X^[8] user @wy4bt shared a photograph of He together with the caption "We must make all people bisexual." The post (shown below) received over 12,000 reposts and 109,000 likes in one day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References