Source: Children’s Health Defense

A Silicon Valley startup is drawing international scrutiny after reports that it wants to create the first genetically edited human child.

Preventive, set up as a public benefit corporation, spent much of the past year quietly investigating how to engineer embryos to eliminate hereditary disease, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Behind the scenes, executives have privately discussed identifying a couple with a genetic disorder who might agree to take part in an overseas experiment — beyond the reach of U.S. regulators and within countries that allow embryo editing.

Publicly, the company insists it is not preparing to attempt a pregnancy and says its work remains strictly pre-clinical. Still, the startup — backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband, and Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong — has signaled far more ambitious intentions.

In a statement announcing $30 million in private funding, CEO Lucas Harrington said Preventive aims to explore embryo editing but pledged not to advance to human trials “if safety cannot be established through extensive research.”

However, people familiar with internal conversations told the WSJ that leaders claimed they had already identified a couple interested in taking part. The company has reportedly examined regulatory environments in places like the United Arab Emirates, where genetic modification of embryos faces fewer restrictions than in the U.S.

Federal law bars the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from even reviewing an application for a clinical trial “in which a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.”

Mistakes can be ‘passed down through generations’

Gene-editing tools such as CRISPR have already transformed medicine by allowing scientists to cut, add or rewrite DNA in living patients.

But editing sperm, eggs or embryos crosses into more controversial territory because any alterations — intended or accidental — would become inheritable.

“Human biology is extremely complex. We don’t really understand it all that well,” Jamie Metzl, a member of the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing, told NewsNation. Attempting embryo modification now would amount to “Nuremberg style human experimentation,” he warned.

Katherine Long, who co-wrote the WSJ report on Preventive, noted that even as gene-editing technology becomes safer and more efficient, significant uncertainties remain.

“Every single time we edit genes, there’s still a possibility we might make a mistake,” she said on the WSJ’s “Tech News Briefing” podcast. “And if you’re editing an embryo, that mistake could be passed down through generations.”

Long said that as recently as May, scientists, patient advocates and biotechnology companies called for a 10-year moratorium on embryo editing.

The only known case of children born from edited embryos occurred in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of three babies whose embryos he attempted to engineer to resist HIV.

The revelation sparked global outrage and led to He’s three-year prison sentence in China for the illegal practice of medicine. Scientists later said the children are not immune to HIV despite the attempted edits.

He is now trying to launch a new embryo-editing startup of his own, according to Long.

‘It’s just wrong to think that humans are just like computers’

Preventive vowed it is working transparently and will not move ahead until the science proves safe, Long said.

Supporters of the technology argue that eliminating heritable diseases before a child is born could spare millions from suffering. “I chose to invest in Preventive because I care about research that helps people avoid disease,” Altman’s husband, Oliver Mulherin, said in a statement reported by the WSJ.

Armstrong said in an X post that more than 300 million people worldwide live with genetic diseases, and correcting them early could save lives.

Excited to be an investor in Preventive!

More than 300 million people globally live with genetic disease. Foundational research should be done to determine if safe and effective therapies can be developed to cure these diseases at birth. It is far easier to correct a smaller… https://t.co/UOO5MOItOo

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) November 6, 2025

Preventive isn’t Armstrong’s first foray into commercializing human biotechnology. He previously invested in Orchid, a controversial embryo editing company. And in June, he announced on X that he was “ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos” and was “looking for gene-editing scientists and bioinformatics specialists to form a founding team” for the project.

Critics argue the push to modify embryos is being driven more by the tech sector than by clinicians or geneticists. “It’s not coincidental that these are tech people,” Metzl told NewsNation. “It’s just wrong to think that humans are just like computers.”

Scientists also worry about where embryo editing might lead. While existing in vitro fertilization procedures allow parents to screen embryos for genetic disorders, actively modifying embryos — for traits like height, cognition or appearance, according to the WSJ — raises much bigger questions.

Long said researchers remain divided over whether editing embryos is even necessary: “Do we need to edit embryos? Could there be other ways that people could have healthy babies apart from embryo editing? And some people have raised the specter of eugenics.”

‘Eliminating disease always threatens to end with eliminating difference’

Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for developing CRISPR gene-editing technology, told the WSJ that the scientific community “will be watching” to see whether Preventive and companies like it are “moving forward responsibly.”

Comedian and political commentator Russell Brand echoed that concern on his podcast.

“What begins with eliminating disease always threatens to end with eliminating difference,” he said, calling Preventive’s language “soft, benevolent and catastrophically naive.”

“Once society accepts the premise that humans can be ‘enhanced,’ we step onto a slope that has never led anywhere good,” Brand said.

Related articles in The Defender

• Tech Billionaires Spearhead Efforts to Build Gene-Edited Designer Babies
• Gene-Edited Humans? Scientists Sound Alarm as UK Approves CRISPR Therapy to Treat Blood Disease
• Gene Editing of Human Embryos Could Have ‘Dangerous Consequences’
• Will CRISPR Gene-editing Technology Lead to Creating the ‘Perfect Baby’?