It now turns out that the American biophysicist Michael W. Deem from Rice University was far more involved in the widely condemned “CRISPR babies” experiment than was previously known. STAT learned that Deem was the senior author on a paper entitled “Birth of twins after genome editing for HIV resistance” submitted to Nature in November, 2018. The first author on the paper is He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who led the gene-editing research now universally condemned. Nature of course rejected the paper without review.

If this information is confirmed by subpoena at the behest of Rice University, Deem’s days in academia are numbered.