OpenAI CEO Sam Altman among investors in embryo gene-editing venture

By Ian M. Giatti, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, November 19, 2025

San Francisco-based startup Preventive has raised nearly $30 million from investors, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, to develop embryo gene-editing technology aimed at preventing hereditary diseases.

The company, founded as a public benefit corporation, stated its goal is “to determine through rigorous preclinical work whether preventive gene editing can be developed safely to spare families from severe disease.”

Preventive co-founder and gene-editing scientist Lucas Harrington pledged to “not advance this technology to clinical human use if safety cannot be established through extensive research.” 

“We will not compromise safety standards to accelerate timelines,” Harrington wrote.

Creating gene-edited babies is currently illegal in the United States, the United Kingdom, and most countries. Preventive is considering conducting clinical work in the United Arab Emirates, where embryo editing is not prohibited, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Altman’s same-sex partner, Oliver Mulherin, who announced the birth of a boy in February, is said to be the driving force behind the couple’s investment in Preventive, which is only one of a “growing number of startups” focused on gene editing, WSJ reported. Other ventures include Nucleus, which offers polygenic embryo screening for just under $10,000, and Herasight, a genetics company described by one of its founders as an “IVF startup.”

The gene editing movement passed a milestone in May after researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania used gene-editing platform CRISPR to successfully treat a baby born with a rare, incurable genetic condition.

Gene editing proponents have suggested the technology could potentially allow the possibility of making “any kind of DNA change that anyone wants at just about any site in the human genome” — a startling prediction which, in 2019, prompted Christian geneticist Francis Collins to call for a moratorium of at least five years on heritable human gene editing.”

In a 2019 piece published by Discover magazine titled “We Must Never Allow Our Technology to Eclipse Our Humanity,” Collins wrote, “Scientists and leaders around the globe have an obligation to consider the appropriate use — if any — of heritable human gene editing. This involves scrutinizing the safety of such experiments, including the risk of unintended mutations, as well as a clear-eyed analysis of actual medical need.”

Now, just half a decade later, Christian Post Executive Editor Dr. Richard D. Land is also sounding the alarm about gene-editing efforts like Preventive.

“Scientific attempts to identify, manipulate, and engineer genes in sperm, female eggs and embryos are fraught with huge ethical and moral issues,” said Land in a Nov. 14 column.

“First, which human beings are going to decide which genetic traits are to be preferred and which are not?” he continued. “Treating known genetic defects to make a child normal is one thing. To seek to artificially enhance IQ or musical or athletic ability is quite another matter entirely.”

Land added, “In attempting to play God (a fatal attraction for many human beings), we will inevitably fail because we are flawed human beings, not the infinite Heavenly Father. Which traits should be enhanced and what should be culled out of the human genome?”