‘Make People Better’: The CRISPR babies story you probably don’t know, and how it was filmed in real-time

In May of 2017, Samira Kiani found herself in a San Diego hotel ballroom surrounded by some of the CRISPR field’s brightest shining stars. Jennifer Doudna, George Church, and others were all there at the behest of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to talk about gene drives — a CRISPR-enabled technology that forces a genetic trait through a population at evolutionary warp speed — and what they as scientists could do to build guardrails around them. Later that summer, DARPA would devote $65 million to funding some of these efforts, through its Safe Genes program.

Kiani, a geneticist at the Arizona State University who had worked with Church to advance CRISPR-based genetic circuits while a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was relieved to see such standout scientists taking the safety and controllability of these technologies seriously. But as the months went by, she realized that the labor they were doing was largely confined to their laboratories. Although talk that day in May had centered around the need for societies to be informed about how fast this science was moving, no one was doing the work of starting a public dialogue. 

So in November of that year, she called up filmmaker Cody Sheehy, and they started talking about making a documentary together. “Very early on we wanted to make a film that would tell the story of the humans behind the work, and not science itself,” said Kiani. She used her connections in the world of gene editing to find a few interesting subjects to follow; they included Church and MIT Technology Review reporter Antonio Regalado. Filming began before the year was out. 

Get unlimited access to award-winning journalism and exclusive events.

Subscribe

Log In