Last month, Chinese national He Jiankui flouted a vigorous scientific debate when he told a room full of scientists that he had manipulated the embryos of Chinese twins, using Crispr, and made one resistant to their father’s HIV. He announced to the group that the twins of the experiment had already been born.

The big reveal was ethically dubious at best. He never went through proper channels to get his experiment approved. The scientist is being condemned by his contemporaries for ignoring universally respected protocol and forgoing peer research. In The Washington Post, Eileen Hunt Botting wrote that He’s experiment had “no moral or scientific justification, given that the medical profession can successfully prevent fathers from transmitting HIV without genetic engineering.” Botting went on to compare He’s experiment to popular science fiction: “However extreme their scenarios, both ‘Gattaca’ and ‘Frankenstein’ remind us that all children are vulnerable to discrimination based on factors beyond their control—including circumstances shaped by artificial reproductive technology.”

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In practice, use of these techniques is a lot grimmer. “The idea that [gene editing] could be rolled out in subsaharan Africa is a fantasy,” Hank Greely, a professor who specializes in the ethics of genetics at Stanford, told me. “The place where HIV is most prevalent is the place where people have the least access to medical care,” he said, explaining that for the foreseeable future the technology will cost a lot of money.