Remember all the commotion and immediate backlash against the idea of CRISPR babies — human embryos that have their genes altered with CRISPR — after a Chinese researcher created a pair of twins with altered genetic code in 2018 and 2019?
Well, the concept hasn’t gone away, much to bioethicists’ chagrin. Now, Russian biologist Denis Rebrikov of Moscow’s Pirogov Medical University is telling New Scientist that he still plans to gene-hack human embryos, in an attempt to prevent congenital deafness.