Were the babies CRISPRed with government funds?

It seems increasingly likely that the Chinese government may have helped fund the “CRISPR babies” study, unwittingly or not. Documents reviewed by STAT raise doubts about the recent investigation from the Chinese government, which concluded that scientist He Jiankui acted mostly alone. The documents, which include a slide presentation prepared by He’s team, cite three government agencies as funding sources.

“I don’t think He Jiankui could have done it without the government encouragement to press ahead,” bioethicist Jing-Bao Nie of New Zealand’s University of Otago told STAT’s Jane Qiu. Now, the government is positioning He as a scapegoat, “so that everybody else can be vindicated.”