😑 Evil personified https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/30/there-is-no-way-to-stop-this-biotech-barbie-cathy-tie-on-her-mission-to-genetically-modify-babies Gene editing has the power to alter the trajectory of human evolution for ever; the direction it takes will depend on who wields the editing tools. “There is no public funding available for researchers in the space,” Tie explains. “Everything is privately funded.” It’s up to entrepreneurs to demonstrate the potential benefits for humankind, she says, so regulators may soften their hardline stance and allow them to rewrite human DNA. For anything to change, there needs to be wider public acceptance of gene editing. With that in mind – and in the spirit of the openness she claims as her USP – Tie has invited me to join her in the run-up to her party as she takes on what she calls the “fear dressed up as caution” about her field. Her goal, she says, is to save humanity from the cruel tyranny of heritable diseases. But, as her birthday celebration demonstrates, Tie doesn’t do things by halves. If she succeeds, what next? Money is flowing into human genetic engineering. Since Tie arrived in New York last August, some of the richest men in the world have begun investing in her rivals. Gene editing startup Preventive launched in October with the stated aim of “preventing disease before birth”, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin, along with Brian Armstrong, the CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, are among its investors. Seven months before Preventive’s launch, Armstrong coined the term “the Gattaca stack” – after the dystopian 1997 sci-fi film about a near-future society dominated by genetically engineered super-beings – in a post on X describing technologies he says will be routinely used to create the babies of the future. Gene editing “for disease prevention, or enhancement” was included in Armstrong’s list. For him, at least, this is about improving babies, as well as avoiding disease. It would be easy to take Tie at her word that she only wants to use gene editing to alleviate human suffering. But a little over a year ago she was using this technology to biohack pets – trying to create glow-in-the-dark rabbits, hypoallergenic cats and even dragons that would be sold on to consumers – with her first ever gene editing startup, the Los Angeles Project. “I’m personally really interested in the unicorn,” Tie said at the time.