The Journal. - Fertility Inc.: The Embryo Editing Dinner

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Genetically engineered babies are banned in the U.S. But that isn’t stopping Silicon Valley tech titans from trying to make one. In this final installment from The Journal’s investigation into the fringes of the fertility industry, WSJ’s Emily Glazer reports on the controversial new companies pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - Fertility Inc.: One Dad, One Hundred Babies - Fertility Inc.: ‘Our Money Was Gone’ - Fertility Inc.: When the Surrogate Gets Left With the Bill - Fertility Inc. from The Journal Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, it's Jess. And Ryan, tickets for our live show in Los Angeles are on sale now. Join us Tuesday, April 28th at the L. Ray Theater at 8 p.m. There will 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.

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. 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 finish 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? 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. 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. So one more big picture question before we dig into the details. What's at stake here? Life as we know it? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, March 27th. 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. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity. You check how well something performs before you buy it. Why should investing be any different? Fidelity gets that performance matters most. With sound financial advice and quality investment products, they're here to help accelerate your dreams.

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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 H. Zhen Kui, who in 2018 claimed to have done embryo editing. He 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. Prominent scientists denounced Ha. I mean, I think it's very disturbing. It's inappropriate.

It goes against all of the guidelines that were established. Ha Zheng Kui 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. Why are people concerned about this technology? All right, there's a bunch of things that 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 they're kids too, and they're 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. 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.

Hmm, right? There could be some group of people that are enhanced and therefore smarter, better, stronger, faster. And then they could pass that onto their own offspring and then suddenly you have like a new class of human. 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.

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. 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 future where embryos are carefully screened and selected to produce the best babies. I've taken the liberty of eradicating any potentially prejudicial conditions,

pretty much for baldness, myopia, alcoholism, and addictive susceptibility, propensity for violence, obesity, etc. We didn't want, I mean, diseases, yes, but... Armstrong seems to be. 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. He has referenced that it's out in the open. He's not necessarily trying to hide it. Among the tools he envisioned in this Gattaca stack was embryo editing for, quote, disease prevention or enhancement. 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. 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 to our investigations editor's office. and grabbed the deputy editor.

And I was like, you guys will not believe what I heard. This thing is real. That's next. This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Tows. Capable and confident. It's fit for everyday life.

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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,

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 Delaware corporate filing and a company had been created. There 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. 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. 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. Hmm. So, in other words, they're saying, we want to use this technology to prevent diseases. And to do it really safely and responsibly. 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 is 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.

He 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. 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. 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, an 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, 26, listed as a senior scientist. Another person started in December 2025.

That company is growing since we reported on it. 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. They were screening them, testing them for disease risks and other traits, and then using that information to decide which embryo to implant. All that remains is to select the most compatible candidate. That future is already here for some parents. For a long time, people doing IVF have had the option to screen for diseases like cystic fibrosis

and Tay Sachs. But a new crop of embryo screening companies are promising much more than that. A bunch of new startups are claiming that they can help prospective parents be able to choose more traits with the embryos that they create. Some offer eye color, baldness. It's not just cosmetic. There's also more screening for different diseases beyond what you could traditionally get. One of these startups is a company called Orchid, which focuses on screening for disease risk, Like, I think basically sex is for fun and embryo screening is for babies.

That's the company's CEO and a promotional video. It's going to become insane not to screen for these things. Orchid provides information on a wide range of diseases, including complex conditions influenced by lots of genes, like Alzheimer's, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. They charge $2,500 per embryo. Brian Armstrong is one of Orchid's investors. But while Orchid focuses on disease,

other startups go much further. We look at something like height, even eye color, hair color. Intelligence. Intelligence. We give you acne. Acne. We give you the full range of insights there is to know about your future child. That was a CEO of a startup called Nucleus.

Its services started about $10,000. The company recently ran an ad campaign in New York City Subways that included the tagline, Have Your Best Baby. Scientists and bioethicists. have accused some of these startups of essentially marketing eugenics. They've also questioned the accuracy of some of these tests. But unlike embryo editing, embryo screening is perfectly legal in the U.S.

And some screening companies say their lab-developed tests aren't subject to FDA regulation. I definitely get the concerns, but as a parent, you know, who wants what's best for your kids. I can see how this can be really alluring. Absolutely. I think that's a big question, right? Who's going to be that person to say,

why wouldn't you want to help eradicate diseases? And I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't have some kind of personal connection to someone somewhere who knows someone who died from a genetic disease. And if you said, I can help cure this, who's going to say no to that? But the question, though, is where do you draw the line?

And there's just so much morality tied up in that. How could there not be? It also seems in a lot of ways that this story is like a case study and how the medical community in Silicon Valley just approach problems very differently. Yeah, I mean, if you take a step back, it's almost like comparing the perhaps lowercase C, conservative nature of academia to the other extreme of tech entrepreneurs. One group wants to study every last thing, and the other one wants to rip off the band-aiding,

start doing it. Just try it and see what happens and then learn from your mistakes. Ask for forgiveness later. You know, Elon Musk sends rockets up in space, and he'll do it quickly, and the rocket might blow up, but then he'll learn from them. But some scientists are saying, you can't do that with a human life. This is the last of our stories

digging into the fringes of the fertility industry, at least for now. To hear previous episodes, check out the Spotify playlist linked in the show notes. That's all for today. Friday, March 27th. The journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.

Additional reporting in this episode by Catherine Long and Amy Doxer Marcus. The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gedkari, Isabella Jopal, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Jessica Mendoza, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de La Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singey, Jivica Verma, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamise, and me, Ryan Knudsen. This episode is produced by Annie Minoff and edited by Colin McNulty. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard.

Our theme music is by So Wiling. and was remixed for this episode by Peter Leonard. Additional music this week from Catherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, So Wiley, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Kate Gallagher and Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. See you Monday. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick.

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