In 2015, the 12-person organizing committee of the first International Summit on Human Gene Editing—which included Crispr co-inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier—issued a statement on how the world should responsibly push forward the science of permanently altering the DNA of Homo sapiens. Combined with other changes that had sprung biology free from the ivory tower, the concern was that someone with a modicum of expertise would go rogue and start a Crispr-It-Yourself baby project.

Only three years later, we now know that someone is named He Jiankui. On Wednesday, the Chinese-born, American-trained scientist shared details of the first such experiment, in which He claims to have Crispr’d a pair of twin girls and implanted one additional edited embryo in a woman’s womb. The news was met with nearly universal condemnation from the world’s scientists. Chinese government authorities ordered an investigation, calling it a brazen violation of Chinese law and a breach of an ethical bottom line, “which is both shocking and unacceptable.”

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On top of all these alleged transgressions, He may have committed one more: the unauthorized use of Crispr components intended only for research purposes. According to the consent form he gave to potential parents, He’s team was using materials purchased from two American biotechnology companies to make edits to human embryos bound for implantation. The documents named Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher Scientific as the supplier of Cas9—the bacterial protein that clamps onto DNA and delivers a double-stranded slice—and Bay Area startup Synthego as the maker of its synthetic guide RNA. If gene editing were a butcher shop, Thermo Fisher would craft the knives and Synthego would instruct on which cuts to make.

He may have spent the last two years working in secret, but he hasn’t been working in a void. American Crispr companies, many of them founded or advised by the field’s biggest stars, have also been hard at work to lower the costs and labor associated with gene editing. Their mission is to make Crispr accessible to everyone. And now they’re getting a lesson in what democratization of that technology really looks like.

“The difficult thing is that when materials leave our hands and they’re in someone else’s hands, there’s no way of ultimately controlling it,” says Paul Dabrowski, who co-founded Synthego in 2012 with his brother Michael. Back then, Doudna and Charpentier, along with fellow gene editing pioneer Feng Zhang, had just introduced the world to what was possible with Crispr—faster and easier genome manipulation than ever before. But Silicon Valley technologists like the Dabrowskis (who formerly worked as rocket engineers at SpaceX) looked at all that micropipetting and lines of hand-typed genetic code and saw an opportunity to go even faster.

They started Synthego to bring the best of Moore’s Law—miniaturization, automation, parallelization—to gene editing. By adding in some slick software and artificially intelligent design, Synthego made ordering Crispr constructs to target any human gene a matter of a few clicks, a few hundred dollars, and waiting for the FedEx driver to show up at your door.

When Doudna joined Synthego’s advisory board earlier this year, she described it as an essential company, one that was "poised to transform the industry by making the application of Crispr simpler, faster, and more valuable to innovators previously unable to realize its full potential,” she said in a press release at the time.

Of course, He’s team could have obtained Crispr components elsewhere or made them from scratch in his lab at Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen. But both time and money were of the essence in He’s race to make biological history.