In Paolo Bacigalupi’s masterful 2009 novel The Windup Girl, bio-engineered plagues have ravaged the world while “company men” working for large corporate conglomerates genetically engineer crops and people for profit. Last week, He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, reminded us that this dystopian future is less far-fetched than it might appear when he purportedly created the first gene-edited babies in history.

Using a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9, He — who is reportedly now missing — says he modified the CCR5 gene in twin girls conceived by in vitro fertilization. This is the first such instance of inducing a permanent change in inheritable, human DNA. If He’s claim is true, it marks a definitive moment in scientific and human history: the first time humans have deliberately and permanently altered their own DNA, opening a Pandora’s box of ethical and moral dilemmas. This news is especially troubling given the power of corporate biotech interests to shape the discussion around acceptable uses of gene editing.

The gene-editing technology He used to perform his historic feat — the product of research carried out by numerous scientific groups at universities around the world — is less than ten years old. At the beginning of the decade, two groups of scientists, led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier at Berkeley and Feng Zhang and George Church at MIT, showed that by modifying the naturally occurring CRISPR-Cas system, the same basic molecular components could also be used to edit the human genome (or in principle any genome). What distinguishes CRISPR-Cas from earlier gene-editing technologies is the ease with which one can edit target DNA. CRISPR is so simple to use that there are even DIY mail-order CRISPR kits that allow anyone to “hack DNA.”